CALCULABLY LENGTHENING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12272, 16 May 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

CALCULABLY LENGTHENING.

[BY TOHT7NOA.] ? A quiver of uneasiness visibly permeated the world of men yesterday, agitating it as an earthquake does the physical earth, for was it not whispered by the cables to all peoples and nations that the days are "calculably lengthening?" This on the authority of the famous Cambridge astronomer, who called the famous Darwin father and is himself a crowning example of the brain development possible to the primordial ape. He tells the Royal Institute that one day will presently become as long as two, because the earth spins slower and slower on its axis. An interesting problem this to absent-minded scientists who forget whether or not they have had their dinner, but a very disturbing suggestion to make to the Daily Paid. Imagine the tired navvy, tightening his belt and wondering what ailed him 4 and the learned statisticians demonstrating that man was growing stronger because he could shift two cubic yards of earth in the time wherein once he only shifted one! Imagine the sturdy bricklayer, vainly endeavouring to keep within the tally, and the intelligent cabman trying to make a quarter of an hour fare from the wharf to Epsom! Imagine the joy of the Kai-para-line traveller at getting to town before dark, and his mystification at finding out that he could still walk as fast as the steam-horse! Imagine the boastful temper of racehorse owners, motorists, shipping companies, and cable boards! To Sydney in lorty-eight hours would be the usual thing, but what about the stoker and the engineer and the deck-hand, and the rest of the Daily Paid? The thing ought not to lie allowed. Professor Darwin might have some consideration for Arbitration Board difficulties and let the old earth go spinning down the endless grooves of changes without mathematical , interference.

There may be compensations of course. A man will be bald before he is entitled to a vote, and a judge will forget how to keep order in bis Court before he is entitled to retirement. But perennial youth will smile among the ladies, and the dashing matron of thirty-three—that dangerous age, according to the much-experienced Jeune—will be able in good faith to produce her baptismal certificate and to weep aloud for the sister cut off untimely at the juvenile age of -seven. There will be no old maids in the marriage market when it is made a crime to kiss the poor infant under 16, and—think of it—no more war if our humanity still revolts at the idea of making food for powder of the poor infant's innocent little twin brother. What a time it will be, too, for the six-footers who are under the school-age and not even allowed to be half-timers! And imagine, only imagine, four high tides on every summer holiday— the wearying moon slows up also and dawdles with the dawdling earth. But the Daily Paid will hardly think of these advantages, it is to be feared. They will badger the Board to death, and will go out on strike if the Board should venture to retort that it has only been accustomed to give twenty-five per cent. rises, and cannot dream of doubling rates in one up. The landlord will demand double rent, and the man of fixed income will sit on the sidewalk looking after the boxes while his despairing wife interviews the omnipotent Premier of the day. For when the worst comes to the worst the young-old ladies in their thirties will have a word with Governments, and it will be a bold Minister who to their face says them nay. He will have to get off and put his shoulder to the earth and start it spinning again at the orthodox gait. For upon him will pounce the ruined boarding-house lady, whose famishing boarders come to every meal with the healthy appetites of ten hours rolled into five And the artisan's wife, who has forgotten the look of money before the next wages clay comes round. And the shop- I lady -whose legs totter under her feet with j long standing, and the unhappy mother j whose darling daughter is to be wedded when the lassie comes of age, and who finds the domestic fireside hardly large enough for two gentlewomen in their prime. Never will Cabinet .Ministers Hock cheerfully to Auckland in those illomened days. They will shake their fists at high heaven and increase their own salaries on account of the worry it is causing them, and deputations will have to i hunt for them in the desolate valleys ■ tapped by the Central Otago line. Mr. Fowlds will tell them by telegraph what he thinks of them, and their only consolation will be that they need not reply till next day, and that every next day is ! a long way off. But somebody remarks that we need not distress ourselves unduly, that serious as the outlook is we need not demand an Act of Parliament, seeing that the present day will last our time and that to the astronomer, as to the psalmist, "athousand, even a million, years in Thy sight is but as a day." Then Professor Darwin ought to be arrested for disturbing the King's peace, and the cablegram-man along with him. Somebody goes on to say that " calculably" means by a minute fraction of a second in a thousand years, and that in about a thousand million years we shall have an extra hour tagged on to the day, and so. forth. Then it'll last our time, this grey, old world; it'll last our time, surely. We can still take in a boarder at contract rates without fear of bankruptcy, and must dig the Whau Canal without reckoning on getting an extra spadeful out of the Daily Paid. The stupidity of making people uneasy never seems to occur to scientific gentlemen, probably because they are not able to interest themselves in the profound matters that keep the minds of their saner fellowmen in the balance. If Professor Darwin knows what won the Auckland Cup it is probably as much as he does know. The chances are that he hasn't the remotest conception of what show Take-'em-down has at Rotorua with lOst against Keep-your-eye-on-him with 9st. It is doubtful if he ever heard of Florrie Jones' triumph as Mrs. Mac Squeal in "The Joys of Juggins," or has read that thrilling and imperishable masterpiece, " Her and Him," by J. T. W. T. U. Mudd. What wonder then that he potters round among stars and suns and planets and comets, and that when he can get equally ignorant people to listen to him he blithers about " calculably lengthening," and tries to persuade us that things are not what they seem. He is as bad as the scientific gentry who suggest the striking of the earth by a comet or by another planet, its explosions by internal energy, its sweeping by an overbalanced ice-cap. its roast--ing by increased sun -heat. There is no use for men who worry us in this way, who, if we would only let them, would make us imagine that there is something else in life than havftig a good time. Which is, of course, ridiculous on the face of it to any sane man. What could possibly be more sanctifying than our intimacy with and reverence for the respective performances of Take-'em-down, Florrie Jones, and J. T. W. T. U. Mudd?

Nevertheless, somebody still sticks to it that the muddled cabling of such an item, shows that people are beginning to take some interest in other things than those that only please and fascinate, that people are beginning to feel the meaning of everlasting, and to attach more and more importance to the Wisdom that is knowledge of law and less „o the Pleasure that is a-dancing with shadows. Perhaps! And, of course, if you like to look at it that way, there is a certain amount of dramatic splendour in this picture of a life-laden globe rolling slower and still slower along its infinite path, mastered completely and inevitably and inexorably by the hand of its Creator, foredoomed through the inconceivable ages to do as it was meant to do, moving through light and shadow, amid all its seeming vicissitudes, to the appointed end. We might appreciate the spectacle better if it did not make us think of how it may be with us poor mortals, if it is thus with ibe world that seems so vast and so unwieldly. The charm of Take-'em-down, Plorrie Jones, and J. T. W. T. U. Mudd is that they help us not to think.