WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 119, 13 February 1926, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

They believe in preference, to home industries in America.—An English countess has been held up because she was divorced in the British Courts.

One gathers from Councillor Bennett’s explanation that the sole thing the Main Highways Board condemns about the city’s paving is the way it does it. (

Four hundred descendants of tlie mutineers of the Bounty, with but eight surnames among the lot of them, is the state of tilings on Norfolk Island. The mutiny'on H.M.S. Bounty in 1789 was led by Fletcher Christian, and a message to-day records the arrival at Auckland of a schooner from Norfolk Island under the command of his great-grand-son. Nine of the Bounty’s mutineers made for Pitcairn Island, taking Tahitian wives with them, and in 1856, by which time their numbers had grown to 194, the population was removed to Norfolk Island. Two years later 46 returned to Pitcairn Island. In the seventy years since then the 146 Bounty descendants on Norfolk Island have reached by natural increase a total of something over four hundred. In the same period the Pitcairn Island party has increased in numbers from 46 to about 180. Everybody in each case is related several times over to everybody else.

The original nine mutineers who landed on Pitcairn Island, although leaving numerous progeny, did not themselves last long. Within ten years all but one were dead, and with one exception they died violent * deaths. “Drink and the devil had done for the rest,” as the song says, and the drink was a beverage extracted by a Scot, William McCoy, from the root of the tea-tree. The secret of this concoction seems to have died with McCoy, for the Pitcairn Islanders of later generations have been most sober and God-fearing persons, thanks largely to the labours of a Seventh Day Adventist missionary in bygone years.

The Bounty descendants also derive some of their latter day characteristics from John Adams, who from 1800 until his death in 1829, was the sole survivor of the original mutineers, and who ruled, in patriarchal style, over the new generation, devoting himself to rearing his own and his comrades’ offspring to live civilised lives so far as their primitive surroundings permitted. Their ideas on many matters were naturally pretty crude, for When in 1856 they were planted down in the deserted buildings of the old convict settlement on Norfolk Island, what to do with the furniture was a great problem for a while, and such of it as was not chopped up for firewood was thrust out of the way as useless lumber. A curious feature about the patriarchal Adams was that his name was really Alexander Smith, but for some obscure reason he changed it after the mutiny to John Adams. All the innumerable Adamses of Pitcairn and Norfolk are thus fjmiths by rights, and in this instance the great Smith family has been deprived of opportunity of showing its superior fertility over the Browns, Joneses, and Robinsons.

The two pioneers of -cycling and motoring whose deaths are recorded today do not appear conspicuously in the ordinary run of histories of cycling and motoring. In Stoke Poges Church, the church of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” there is a depiction in a stained glass window of an angel riding oh what looks mighty like a velocipede, the progenitor of the modern bicycle. Even earlier ideas on the subject of push, cycling are represented on friezes discovered in the excavations at Pompeii, and still earlier ones on bas-reliefs in Babylon. The name most prominently associated with the old high bicycle was that of James- Starley in 1874, while the modern “safety” bicycle type was first manufactured by Janies K. Starley in 1885. But the whole field of push-cycle invention is full of disputes as to who invented what, and not the least of the quarrels has been as to the credit of the invention of pneumatic tires.

So far from Mr. Belmont inventing the internal conibusion engine that made possible the modern motor-car, the handbooks all award the credit for this to Gottlieb Daimler. Daimler’s invention was made in 1885. M. Daimler fitted one of his motors to a bicycle in 1885, so the motor-bicycle was thus born ahead of the motor-car. he put another in a boat, and had it running on the Seine at the Paris Exhibition of 1887, and motor-launching was born. At that exhibition the Daimler engine was inspected by M Levassor, of the wood-working firm of Panhard and Levassor, and that gentleman became enamoured of its possibilities for the propulsion of a road carriage.

The result was that M. Daimler having provided the engine, M. Levassor bought his patent rights and set to work and added the clutch, the gear-box, and the' differential, and the motor-car as we know it to-day was born. Through all the intervening years' M. Levassor’s lay-out has remained unchanged, with the engine at the front end, the clutch next, the gear box after that, and the differential at the rear, to lei one wheel go faster than the othet round the corners. All the rest is frills and furbelows, and not one really new brain wave on the essential basic components of the motor-car has secured general adoption in the period oi nearly' forty years since the first ol the Panhard and Levassor cars was built. And yet they say . the modern man is wonderfully inventive. Procrastination is the art of trying to .keep up with' yesterday. Few diaries have evoked more bitterness than that of Charles Greville, whose unexpurgated records have lately been published. Greville was not much loved in his life-time, as many stories relate. Once when Lord Clarendon became a privy councillor he called on Greville, then clerk to the council, with a cheque to pay the fees he thought were due. "What a good fellow von are!” exclaimed Greville incautiously. "You have no idea of the trouble I have to get them from some people, VOU know I have no legal right to recovery. “Haven’t you?” said Clarendon who had no reason to love the diarist, and threw his cheque tn the fire The storv became known, and it is doubtful if Greville ever received another fee.

A CAVE MAN’S SOLILIQUISF.S. I loitered through a museum and there I saw, new-hinged with wire, tricked cut for ‘how. The Skull I had a million years ago; The lipless thing grinned with a knowing air, The eyeless sockets gave me stare for stare, And. O my Sweet, the crown still holds the dent You made that memorable morn you bent The grid on it and left it grilled and bare I How fashions change in skulls! We wore them thick And sloping quickly backward from the eyes When I was'in my primal histihood; And did a lover bounce a playful brick Upon his lover’s sconce it was but food For happy laughter, then. Ah, me! Time flies! —Don Marquis.