LEADING A FAST LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 6255, 3 December 1881, Page 7

LEADING A FAST LIFE.

Dr. Siemens, in his address recently at York on the influence of electric light upon vegetatation communicated his experience of an extraordinary adaptation of the general principle. Availing himself of the newmeans of repeating by electricity the ocular effects of sunlight when the day has closed, he refuses to let his greenhouses and forcinghouses sleep between evening and dawn. He can forbid his vines and raspberry canes and strawberries and peas to shut their eyes after their custom for eight, ten or twelve

hours out of the twenty-four. It is a pleasant prospect when the pulf of the steamengine shall suggest hothouse grapes, and the corn be felt to be growing only the faster that the farmer is sleeping. If fruits and flowers have a sentient life, though lower in degree, not unlike in kind that of men, the anticipation is less enviable for them. Life is thought among men to be something good in itself. Although for perfect satisfaction it ought not to stagnate and lie torpid, some amonnt of quantity and protraction is essential to its completeness. It should be long enough for the possessor to stand at times on one side and regard it with the eye of a critic and a connoisseur. He should be able to act like the wine-drinker, who has leisure and not too much thirst to hold his glass to the light and remark its lustre and glow. A cluster of grapes in a quiet t'reenhouse, a peach cn a southern wall, a strawberry plant on a sunny border, have been like j a well-conditioned and properly seasoned human life. They have enjoyed the warmth and invigorating breeze ; they have reddened and swelled in the sun and shower ; they have slept in the night. A fair proportion of loitering belongs to common vegetable existence, which vegetation may be credited with enjoying. Melons are more aromatic, strawberries are richer coloured, bananas have less than usual of the taste of uuscented soap. Though periods of darkness elongate the stalks of plants, Dr. Siemans has satisfied himself that the continual stimulus of light favours the more important advances to the stage at which they become useful for their owners. Science is not only rapid in its effects ; it is economical, whatever the vulgar testimony of cash accounts may say. Nothing is ever lost or wasted in its operations. Were Niagara or the Falls of the Clyde at hand, Dr. Siemens might dispense with an engine to work his electric lights. As water power is too remote, and he is compelled to employ an engine, he at least extracts a profit from the consequent expenditure by substituting the waste steam condensed in a heater for his former greenhouse stoves. By day the sun is there, or should be, to mature fruit and dye flowers. So the electric energy, which in Dr. Siemen's industrious establishment no more than peas and beans is allowed to make holiday, takes a turn of field labour. Until it is wanted to earn prizes at flower shows, or illuminate halls and shrubberies, it cuts chaff, slices swedes, saws timber, pumps water, and renders itself generally useful. What he has been doing 011 a small scale he believes might be done wholesale. A wondrous vista is opened up. There is no reason why the Manchester millowner, after displaying his calico machinery, should not usher his guest into vineries and pineries on the other side of the wall. There the light which moves

the shuttles will have been up all night mellowing fragrant fruit. The iron and steel kings of the north and the west will be able in the morning to reveal to the bewildered visitor Titanic hammers tractable to the thrill of a wireful of electricity. After dinner they may escort him a mile off to see one cornfield growing yellow under the radiance of the same light which subjugated the metal mass, and another crop already falling beneath an electric sickle. The neighbourhood of a factory or a forge, now the most insuperable of objections, will then be a distinct attraction. What Dr. Siemens with his engines and electricity and gardeners does is to hurry the current of vitality at express speed through his conservatories, not to increase its volume. His fruit very likely may be, as he boasts, larger and sweeter and fuller ; it is merely that in the more ordinary course the plant stops for a moment now and then to exhale its luxuriance for its own pleasure. Dr. Siemens extorts from it for the final result the absolute tale of every morsel of nourishment it has imbibed. It is a pity wo cannot persuade ourselves that something more is being accomplished than to despatch vitality faster through all its processes, and to leave Dr. Siemens' hothouse sooner vacant for other grapes and bananas to tenant. There would have been a pleasure in imagining an extension of the same principle to the moral and mental worlds, which have their constant supply of electric energy like the physical. The maintenance of intellectual life at perpetual high pressure, in a condition in which human reason should blossom and ripen within half the time it takes now, is far from inconceivable. Screens and shades of pure white, without malignant blue or only less noxious red and yellow hues, might even be designed to absorb those highly refrangible invisible rays which at present are apt to spoil the experiment of forcing minds by withering up either them or their framework. Modern life, especially in England and the United States, has, indeed, long been attempting to reconstruct itself in analogy to Dr. Siemens' graperies. Unfortunately, when all is done, life because it is lived faster does not appear to be necessarily better than when it is taken more in sips. However it may be with the vegetable world, human beings need occasionally to sleep upon their faculties in order fitly to enjoy or appreciate them. —Times.