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Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17701, 1 March 1923, Page 6

It is to be hoped that the Governors of Canterbury College will be able to do a little more for. music. The appeal of Dr. Bradshaiy ou Monday was the appeal of an artist who knows bettec than most the connexion between musio and scholarship on the one hand, and between temperament and discipline on the other. If there is some foundation for the fear that universities will do to musicians what they tend to do to poets-—lignify them where they do not kill them—there is a -very real danger also that players and composers left to themselves arrive at the kind 0 f stuff of whiclr someone said recently that ho always felt when he heard it that the composer had stuck a large sheet of paper on ihe wall, shot,-ink from a gun at it, and then drawn bar lines through the mess. . For most of us, too, the relation between music and morality is very intimate and real. We may not be able to foliow Dr. Coward, of Sheffield, who at Oxford last month told tbe annual conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians that "choral singing is the greatest factor in raising the nation morally snd physically—the moral radium which- operates all through." To the modern Englishman that is simply a meaningless extravagance. But it would not hare seemed half so extravagant in the days when the English were a race of musicians, and its strangeness to us to-day may not be a sijgn of health.

To show that. the centre of gravity of the National Debt has been "pushed a. little forward," the financial editor of the 'Manchester Guardian" has com-

piled an interesting table. On Septem-1 ber 30fch, 1931, the floating debt was ■ 1320 millions, or 17 per cent, of the j nation's total burden. At the 6ame; time short-term bond! totalled 1673! millions, or per cent. 5 national savings certificates 287 millions, or 3 per cent, of the total; the long term debt; 3345 millions, or 43 per cent; and the ! external debt 1138 millions, or T4 per cent. But by October Ist, 1922, the floating debt was 11 per oent. of thel total instead of 17 per cent., the shfortterm bonds 19 per cent, instead of 23. national savings certificates o per cent, instead of 3, the long-term debt 51 per cent, against 43, and the external debt 14 per cent, as before. Therefore the floating and short-term debts had fallen to 30 per cent, of the total from 40, •while the long-term debt had risen from 43 per cent, to 50—a marked change in the structure of the debt as a whole. This conversion of so much short-term' indebtedness into obligations of more distant maturity he regards aa "by far the most important development in national finance for a year." Exchanges recently to hand show that the end of . that Grand Old Man of Letters, Frederic Harrison, was a gentle dissolution during sleep. On his ninetieth birthday he said: May my end be early, speedy and peaceful 1 I regret nothing done or said in my long and 'busy life. I withdraw nothing, and •am not conscious of any change in mind. In youth I was'called a revolutionary: in old age I am called- a reactionary—both names alike untrue. A lonely widower, I have no happiness to look for. I ask nothing, I seek nothing, I fear nothing. I have done and said all that I ever could have done and said. There is nothing more. I am ready, and await the call. And except that the call did not come for nearly two years, he was granted the end he asked. It 'fras speedy, it was peaceful, it followed no illness, it came in his own home and in liis own bed.. Nor was it entirely inappropriate that ho who lived 111 eighteenthcentury Bath, whoso memory reached back to the dajs before railroads and telegraphs, but who yet believed in the endless march of science, died on the morning of the day on which men talked across the Atlantio.

It will not be surprising if Cainille Flammarion's new star sends certain people to fheir knees. Science to-day tells us that the fiery sword which hung over Jerusalem as a warning of coming destruction was our old friend, Halley's Comet; but a comet a few hundred years aco was associated with the wrath to come. A preacher of the seventeenth century told his congregation that the glow in the vake of a tailed star was "the thick smoke of human sins." There is a nursery rhyme also of the same period which says: Eiglit things there be a comet brings, When it on high doth' horrid range, Wind, Famine, Plague., and Death i to Kings, . War, Earthquakes, Floods, and Direful Change. So if the end of the world is' announced in half a dozen plalpes we muat remember that the day is not far off when these signs and wonders of the firmament produced almost universal panic.

< The > huge meteorite which is reported to have fallen at Quetta will be famous, not for its size, whichi is much less than that of numerous others which haw been discovered, but 'because it appears to be the lftrgest that has actually'been seen to fall. As explained by Sir Richard Gregory, F.RJLS., in a recent lecture in London, meteorites are particles of solid matter, mostly iron and nickel, varying^in size from microscopic grains up to masses weighing thousands of tons; They fall into the earth's atmosphere at speeds varying from 25 or 30 up to about 70 miles a Second, and for the most part are burned up by the friction. Some, reach the earth. It was belived, said the lecturer, that the idol in the temple of Diana at Ephesus and the famous black stone of Mecca, as well as other objects which had been worshipped as of celestial origin at various times and places, were meteoric 6tones which had fallen on the earth in this way. In the Natural History Museum at South Kensington is a mass weighing over three tons, w_hich fell in ; Australia. The biggest meteorite hitherto seen to fall came down at a place in Hungary in 1866 and weighed 6471b, 'biut one found in; Greenland by Peary weighed 3&i tons, and there is a record of another in Mexico with an estimated weight of 60 tons.

In some of the authenticated instances of the fall of only a stone has been noted, but in other cases there have been heavy showers of them, varying in number from two or three dozen to as many as 100,000. The authority on meteorites who wrote the article in the "Encyclopaedia. Britannica" on the subject, comments on the minute probability of one of_these showers from space falling within a town and the still more remote likelihood of a living creature being struck. He gives, several instances which have occurred in England and in other countries of the narrow escapes from being struck, experienced by human beings, but is able to quote only one instance which happened at Mhow, in India, of a man 'bieing killed by a meteorite. 1 Even the writers of fiction have made singularly littie use of this means of getting rid of any of their characters, though all readers of O. Henry will recall the final calamity in : "Phoebe" which seemed to warrant "Bad-Luck" Kearney's belief that lie was under the Bpell of a malignant star.