WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 16, 14 October 1926, Page 10

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

Lenin seems to have had all luck in Russia in dying before they had time to try him for high treason. We hear a lot about scientific research these days, but a lot of good people tell us it is a very unpractical business. The. curious .. tiling . about research is that the madder it is, the more you often get out of it. A recent writer has reminded us that it was a poverty-stricken curate in England who, through a half-crown telescope, in 1639, observed the transit of Venus across the sun for the first time. Those unpractical people, the astronomers, figured out in the eighteenthcentury that there would be transits in 1761 and 1769. The first would be visible, they calculated at St. Helena, and the second in the South Pacific. The scientific people in England thereupon sent in a' memorial to the Government pointing out that the transit of Venus had been “predicted in the last century by an Englishman, and never observed but once since the world began, and that by another Englishman,” .... and, in short, it was up to the Government to send out some English stargazers to have a look at the next ones.

As Britain hadn’t quite settled down to hard-headed, practical democratic government, the authorities, strangely enough, fell m with this crazy idea. The event was a misfire. It was too douav in St. Helena to see anything, and the French attacked the ship that set out for Sumatra, and it never got there. The Royal Society then made a tad for another shot in 17t>9. It buttered old King George HI up with memorials praising his “remarkable love of science” and so on, and saying it was now or never, for Venus would not be performing again for. a hundred years. Most of our politicians would be ashamed if anyone suspected them of anything so unpractical as a love of science, and we can imagine what support there would be in Parliament for a proposal to send the Tutanekai to Kamchatka for ah astronomer-royal to gaze stars. .

' However, poor old George the Third was mad most of his time, as everybody knows, and he was mad enough to fall for it when the scientific tea party at the Royal Society had the effrontery to ask for a. ship to be sent out to “some place in the South Pacific” to observe the transit of Venus the next year.. That ship, as we all know also, was the Endeavour, and tiie'result of this mad star-gaing trip was that here we all are, with a Prime Minister of our own back in London telling them what we think about things at an Imperial Conference,

Then awav back in the forties of last century another harebrained unpractical person developed a great notion of having a look at the ice in the Antarctic. This expedition under Sir John oss called in at the Bay of Islands, 1 a young botanist among its members, one Hooker by name, did some botanising with William Colenso, the missionary printer at the Bay. This expedition led this young Mr. Hooker to write a book about- the botany of Tasmania, then later on he wrote the first comprehensive handbook about the botany of New Zealand, and still later on he did a botany of British Jndia, another of British North America, and so on, and was soon, the foremost botanist of the .world in. the . nineteenth century, arid people knew more about the plants of the world than ever they had known before. • « *

In the ’fifties the dreamy Archduke Maximilian o£ Austria sent a scientific partv on a tour. This Archduke a few year’s after was also unpractical enough to let himselt be made Emperor of Mexico, and was promptly murdered by his grateful Mexicans for his pains. His expedition called at Auckland in its w’anderings, and our Government borrowed its geologist to look at some coal a parson had discovered near there. This geologist, Dr. von Hochstetter, who afterwards rose to great eminence in Europe, put the Waikato coalfield on the map, and in the nine months he spent in New Zealand laid a foundation of geological knowledge about the country that our local geologists have ever since been building on, and discovering what’s what about the lav of our minerals and so on.

Thus we see that three expeditions—all of them a wild fancy waste of money from the sound practical point of view of making money, filling one s stomach, and having a good balance at the bank—each ended up by being of great advantage to us in this countrv It doesn’t appear that the people who sent them out grew any richer. bv them, but they probably felt they had got their worth out of it. And tne moral of scientific research seems to be that what you set out to find way be the lest valuable of things you run across while hunting for it.

Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose operas art being so greatly appreciated in Wellington at the present time, lells some very humorous stories of his experiences in America, which he visited in the middle* 'eighties. . “I was travelling on a stage coach in a rather wild part of California,” he relates, and arrived at a mining camp, where we had to get down for refreshment. As we drove up the driver said : ’They re expecting you here, Mr. Sullivan. I was much pleased to hear this, and when I reached the place I came across a knot of prominent citizens at the whisky store. The foremost of them came up to a big burly man at tuv side and said, ‘Are you Mr. Sull;van?* The man said ana inchcated I was the party wanted. The citizen looked at me rather contemptuously, and after a while said, How much do you weigh?’ I thought tins was a curious method of testing the power of a composer, but I at once answered, ‘About one hundred _ and sixty-two pounds.’ ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘that’s odd to tue anyhow. Do vou mean to say that you gave fits to John S. Blackham in Kansas City?’ I said, ‘No, I did not give him fits.’ He then said, ‘Well, who in the hell are vou?’ I replied, ‘My name is Sullivan.’ 'Ain’t you John L. Sullivan, the slogger?’ he asked. I disclaimed all honour to that title, and told him that I was Arthur Sullivan. ‘Oh, Arthur Sullivan,’ he said, ‘the chap that put “Pinafore” together?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ returned the citizen, ‘l’m sorry you ain’t John L. Sullivan, but still I am glad to' see you. Let’s have a drink.’ ” AT TEA. The kettle descants in a cosy drone. And the voting wife looks in her husband’s face, And then at her guest’s, and shows in her own Her sense that she fills an envied place; And the visiting lady is all abloom, And says there was never so sweet a room. And the happy young housewife does not know That the woman beside her was his first choice. Till the fates ordained it could not be so. . . Betraving nothing in look or voice The guest sits 'smiling and sips her tea. And he throws her a glance yearningly. Hardr