THE DASH FOR THE POLE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 13948, 2 January 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE DASH FOR THE POLE.

BY TO HUNG A. While the inhabitants of these most Fortunate Isles are making the most of their holidays, are basking on pleasant beaches, and breathing the sulphurous air of Rotorua, and packing excursion trains and steamers, and picnicking on tihe grass under shady trees, and watching the running of horses at sunny Ellerslie, Shackleton and his men are making that dash for the South Pole, which New Zealand unitedly hopes will succeed. We never think that some future Shackleton may make a similar summer "dash" for the ice-bound ruins of frozen Auckland, and may come dynamiting down through enshrouding glaciers into the long-buried and legendary treasures of our Town Hall. Yet, unless men lose their pluck and change their ambitions as the Earth grows older and colder, that is what may be. It may help to cool us on these scorching days to remember that the ice-shroud is already forming which will sooner or later wrap round the land we live inand the globe itself. Ice is still dear, for we have to burn good coal to make it, which is a magician's trick that not so long ago would have brought a painful death to everybody connected with tho refrigerating companies. Those who light fires to make ice are certainly 'wizards, and the fate of the wizard was once even more undeniable than the fate of the foolish heretic who wouldn't say lie believed all that Mother Church told him. Some day we shall want to rub ice together to make warmth, for ice will be the cheapest, thing known and coalstuff the dearest —unless, the scientists make a great mistake, as scientists have certainly done before now, although it is a modern heresy to say so. However, if the theory is correctand only those who live long enough will know whether it is or —the Earth started to get colder as soon as it set, and has been, trying to cool down to hundreds of degrees below what we call zero ever since. Water is really just as solid as mud, and air is just as apt to liquefy, granted only the cold. There isn't any reason, excepting that of temperature, why you can't walk to Devonport as easily as to Remuera, or why you can breathe air when you can't breathe kerosene. According to the theory, tho universe is a stupendous natural refrigerator with lumps of matter whirling through it, and when the lumps hit one another they get hot, just as your thumb does when you don't hit the" nail you are driving, only a million million time more so. And then these lumps of matter break out into stars and nebula;, and planetary systems, which may be the reason why we always see stars and feel hot like stars when we walk face on against the edge of an open door in the dark. Then they settle down and begin to get cool again, and after a little while —for a few thousand million years are nothing in the Universe— refrigerator has made them once more into lamps of matter far colder than the coldest glacier Lieutenant Shackleton is looking at to-day: Life, as we have it, is only possible in that chin film of temperature where butter-mak-ing is ordinarily possible. Above it or below it Life is a struggle, considerably above it or considerably below it Life is impossible—that we know there's no theory about this you can try it yourself. And yet, although the butter-making temperature is necessary for our comfort and approximately necessary for our existence as human beings, it may be that there was Wisdom m the belief of our forefathers that Life was possible and intelligent existence possible in other elements than Air. Why should there not be beings in the sun," nations and races and tribes inured to its fiery oceans and its flaming mountains? Why should there not be beings on the moon, acclimatised as it were i o its waterless deserts and its frozen solitudes? To those who only believe in Matter, these dull lumps of" mud whizzing about in the universal refrigerator, fashioning one another into stars and systems, cooling down until, in the ephemeral but-ter-making stage, Life evolves only to wither and perish, may be the beginning and the end. But to" thofe who believe that behind everything is Spirit, which to the Universe is God and in Man is Soul ;;.nd which uses Matter as cloak and garment, the fashions of which change and alter as do the fashion of women's bats, this will not be so evident. And most of us still believe in That Which moved creative when the Earth was without form and void, and Which somehow breathed into the nostrils of Man a living soul. But all this won't bring ice to Auckland. The worst of fussing round among th& Ages is that one can get lost as easily as the man who so often tried to tell Mark Twain about the dog-fight. You must take all the preliminaries for granted and accept the theory that, as the Earth reached the butter-making epoch Man arrived. The Earth gradually cooled and solidified, first at the Boles, wherever the Poles were. The crust often broke; centres of gravity often shifted; great cracks in the crust became mountain ranges; great hollows, as the tardy vapour liquefied, became seas. But always the "Poles cooled first, wherever they were, and even though in the shifting of astronomical cycles they cooled in an irregular and erratic fashion, Life was first possible not at the Equator, but at the X > oiess—if there is anything in the theory at all. The equatorial regions were untenable by living creatures, as we know them, long. after the Poles were quite cool enough to be inhabitable. For the equatorial regions cooled slowest, and cool slowest still. Civilisation is still hardly possible under the Equator, which is still outside the butter-making belt; yet already the Poles are snow-bound, and Life, Man, Civilisation, is being driven from the extremities of the Earth by this shroud of ice which moves relentlessly and surely equator wards. To-day, tho Southern ice cap has only overwhelmed Erebus and Terror, which wave their dying fires over a dead continent once great and temperate and populous. To-morrow, taihoa, it may have overwhelmed Ruapehu and Tarawera, which stand to-day "in the Land of Butter, in the zone pleasantest to mankind. Tomorrow, taihoa, it may have overwhelmed Eden with its pine groves and three-peaked Rangitoto, and may have turned the landlocked reaches that arc the pride of Auckland, into ice-bound and impassable seas. To-morrow, taihoa, it may stretch in unbroken curves from Lime in Peru to Cape Capricornia in. Queensland. Theoretically, that is inevitable. Some day, in a million, a hundred million years, sometime, this must theoretically happen. And shall we freeze or our children? Very possibly, in the end, but not just then. The white man will not freeze as long as there is a single equatorial land left that will grow butter. For the Equa- : tor wiii cool, too. The jungle will give place to the grass hinds. The feet of the bootless will be trotTden on by the booted men. The white nations will press towards the sun, and use till the energy that is in them to seize the once-despised tropical lands. From Polynesia and Malaysia, from India and tropical Africa and tropical America, the surviving English-speaking races of the day will send Franklins to force a passage round Australia, and Shackletons to unearth the ice-bound relics of Auckland, famed in a thousand legends as once the finest city in the world and queen of the Pacific. They will find the broken crockery of picnickers and put it in museums, and they may find an ice-making plant below a glacier and not have humour enough to laugh. And if thinking of such possibilities helps us to keep cool with kindly feelings for our still sunny summer weather, it will not bo all lost—particularly ,0,8 the butter-making climate will last our ti,rj]if-