IDEALISM AND REALISM.

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 22, 26 January 1924, Page 7

IDEALISM AND REALISM.

A LECTURE BY PROFESSOR

BICKERTON.

(FROM OUR OWN CORRBSPONDEMI.)

-LONDON, 29th November. One afternoon this week Professor A. W. Bickerton gave a lecture in the Black Swan Tea Rooms on the "Idealism and Realism of New Zealand." Miss Crjcla-ton-Iprie had issued a number of in* vitations for this tea-hour address. The lecture had an element of autobiograph, but was none the less interesting for that. Under the category of realism there was the climate of the Dominion which accounted for the wealth of growth in all things of the vegetable and animal kingdom. , Professor Bickerton specialised, and taking, his own garden at Wainoni as the epitome of the whole garden of Ne\v Zealand, he showed how the flowers "and ■ plants and trees took their sustenanoe from the air and from the kindly rains rather than from the sands in which they grew. Britain, he said, was' warmed by the steam from the equatorial currents. New Zealand was warmed by the astonishingly attractive sunlight. Its greatest asset was its climate; which could never be destroyed. Even the sinking of artesian wells and the resulting flood of pure water Professor Bickerton turned into something of a romance.

Out of New Zealand so long ago as 1878 came the theory that was to put an end to the "dismal doctrine of eternal death." This then wag the idealism of the Dominion. Had his own work, "The Cycle of the Eternal Heavens," been widely known and read throughout Europe ten years ago, Profoasor Bickerton believed there would have been no .world .war.