The Press Saturday, September 5, 1931. The Wilkins Blood.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20334, 5 September 1931, Page 14

The Press Saturday, September 5, 1931. The Wilkins Blood.

Although nothing except a doubtful radio whisper has been heard from Sir Hubert Wilkins for several days, it is still the opinion of the explorer Stefansson, according to a cable message to-day, that he is safe. The same reassuring authority some time ago slated very clear reasons for his belief that probing the Arctic in a submarine is not, as to the inexpert it/seems, a harebrained, dangerous enterprise, though he was troubled by doubts after seeing the Nautilus and its equipment; but if Stefansson's reasons had been twice as clear and twice as strong they would not extinguish astonishment at such a habit of audacity as Wilkins's. During the Balkan war of 1912-13 he was " the mad Englishman." For the next four years he was StefanssOn's second-in-command in the Arctic. When he returned and photographer and air observer to the Australian forces in Flanders, Sir John Moiiash described him as " the most " coolly intrepid man in the Australian " army." He made a bid for the prize for the first England-Australia flight, and after Antarctic and North Australian explorations began his Arctic flights. Twice he was missing, once for thirteen, again for seventeen days; and in 1928, when he and Eielson completed the Point Barrow-Spitzbergen flight, tile adventure was crowned by Wilkins's pushing the aeroplane off from the clogging snow and climbing into it, in flight, up a dangling rope. • There followed his Antarctic flights and discoveries; and two years ago he announced his submarine project. It is impossible not to ask what urges a man to attempt so much and, in spite of scientific skill and precaution, to defy so much; and it is easy to answer, of course, the undying spirit of adventure. Yet this is not Sir Hubert answer. Bad seasons in he told a New York gathering, had brought severe hardships on his family and ruined many others. If good and bad season? could be accurately predicted, Australia would save millions of pounds.; and this was why he had turned to Antarctic exploration and made it his life's ambition to see a chain of meteorological stations established in South Polar regions. But those who know that Sir Hubert numbers among his ancestors a certain John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, will fancy that they trace hereditary obedience in his pulse and the searching curiosity of his mind, even in the direction of its search.

John Wilkins (1614-1072) was the son of an Oxford goldsmith, himself "a very ingenjose man with a very " mechanieall head. He was much for "trying of experiments, and his head "ran. much upon the perpetuaJl "motion." Tho son was educated at ! Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and took i orders, but all his leicure was devoted to mathematics*and science. His first published work was The Discovery of a World in the Moon, to which in the third edition he added an appendix on " the possibility of & passage thither." This, of course, was a speculation on the possibility of flying to the moon; and it is odd to remember that Sir Hubert Wilkins has Interested himself in recent revivals, still speculative, no doubt, but definitely more practical, of the same project. Nor did the Bishop drop the subject. He returned to ,volitation again at least once, in his Mathematical Magick (1648), where he disousees "a certain English monk u called ijjlmerW' "about the " Confessor's time," flew for a distance of more than a furlong from a town in Spain, and he reoords other flights, from St. Mark's in Venice and at Nuremberg. But if ft is possible to smile at the Bishop's uninstructed (though often shrewd) Aeronautical theories, he must be taken seriously as a man of science and honoured for the institution of the. Royal Society. When he was in London, he promoted those weekly meetings of "divers worthy per- " sons inquisitive into natural philosophy and other parts of " learning, and particularly of what "hath been called the new philosophy i'or experimental philosophy"; and this, the " Invisible College " of Robert Boyle, was the seed of the Rbyal Society. When he became Warden of Wadham College, the meetings were renewed in his lodgings and were attended by " the most inquisitive " members of the University, including Boyle, Petty, Wallis, and Wren; bUt he was so manifestly the centre and inspirer of the group that his title to be called the founder of the Royal Society is clear. The improvement of mechanical transport was one of his pet interests, to which Evelyn's Diary testifies:

I called at Durdans, where I found 3)r. Wilkins, Sir W. Petty, and Mr Hooke contriving chariots, a wheel fo f r one to run races in, and other mechanical inventionsj perhaps three such persons together were not to bo found elsewhere;

and in the same year (1665) Pepys found Wilkins and Hooke " considering " again of the business of chariots, and "trying their new invention." It would be straining connexion a little hard, perhaps, to say/that Sir Hubert in his aeroplanes and Submarines is the Bishop over again, in his " chariots "; but there is no law against such efforts of mind. But general resemblance is enough, the resemblance and relation of one explorer to another; and an explorer Bishop Wilkins was, bj bent ; and audacity of mind. Anthony & Wood said of him: ; . He was ... an excellent mathematician and experimentist, and one as well seen in - mechanisms and new philosophy, of Which he a great promoter, as any man of his tinio..

Two other touches may be added. •" I " cannot: say that there was anything decent in him, but a constant -mind "and settled principles," gays Wood, and it ia not ungenerous to note the correspondence of this with Sir Hubert's impetuosity, and the careless, sometimes theatrical flourish of an adventurer. The second is Aubrey's,

sketch, for the eye, in which the Bishop appeal's as "lustie, strong growxje, " well and broad-shouldered," and not the Bishop only..