NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14924, 23 February 1912, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE LOST ATLANTIS.

Plato's Lost Atlantis has been identified recently with the island of Crete, which answers to the description given in the Critias or the Timteus: The island was the way to other islands, and front these yon might pass to the whole of the continent surrounding the ocean; very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea. It was lost when Crete, somewhere about 1450 8.C., was attacked and all its wonderful civilisation overthrown by the invaders from Greece. On the other hand it is not true, of Crete what the Egyptian priests at Sais told Solon, that it was swallowed up in a day and a night by the ocean, and this lias led other inquirers to .look further afield, for the Lost Atlantis. Many of them, and M. Henri Germain, a young and distinguished Paris naturalist, has joined their number, believe, says La Lilxrte, that the Azores, Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Cape Verd Islands once formed a large continent. Connected towards the south/with Senegambia, it had, thinks the Paris savant, a mighty coast line stretching from Cape Verde to Venezuela. At an epoch relatively recent from the point of view of geology, that is, a v mere 100,000 years ago, in what we should call the Pliocene age, the great continent sank into the Atlantic, leaving behind one large island, which in the Pleistocene age. split up into those groups of islands known as the Azores, Madeira, Canary, and Capo ■ Verd islands. It is worth noting, perhaps, that a few months ago a learned German, Dr. Leo Frobenius, claimed that ho had found the Lost Atlantis in the district of .Benin, Southern Nigeria, basing his argument on the exist-

cnce in that region of wonderfully worked quartz pillars and clay portraits of classic beauty, and pottery splendidly overlaid with glass.

WHERE ARE THE SATIRISTS? "Where are they?those old correctors of men's excesses, women's foibles, the warpings of the times, the- nonsensical vagaries of ' movements,' and the leeway of a nation's tendencies—where are they?" asks Mr. J. E. Patterson, in the Academy. Those strenuous wielders of the lash of satire, who cared for no man that did not act aright, who feared no dishonest organisation no matter how powerful, and respected nothing that did not make- for British integrity and general welfare — ! where are they? Gone, alas! with the wigs, the snuff-boxes, and the coloured clothes of our grandfathers. Yes, gone; and the nation is left the poorer for their going. What concerns us is the absence of that younger generation which should have arisen to tako their place. In vain do we level our mental gaze at the horizon of things not corporeal, looking for a sign of those who should come, yet do not. Wo sigh, and can discern no comfort. The want, the need is for -witty satire in generous measures, in the large measure of the play and the book; we want it. in treatments, not in doses. And wo look anxiously, longingly, for the dramatist and the litterateur who shall arise to tho vacant places and put a laughing scorn on (he abuses, the paraded " personalities, " tho freak idiosyncrasies, and .the living " cranks" of to-day. THE BRITISH COAT, INDUSTRY. Tho British miner's desire for better wages and more consistent earnings is human and intelligible (says a London paper). The public has a strong sympathy with these men who toil under such disagreeable conditions, away from the light of the sun, in circumstances of continual danger. It admires ' their never-failing heroism, when tho lives of their comrades are at stake. Yet it may not unreasonably ask them to think, in their own interests, before they push matters to extremes. And it may remind them that, should they strike, they will violate solemn agreements entered into by their own leaders with the employers. The mineowners have made large concessions in the past. They now maintain, and it would seem with perfect truth, that the payment of the minimum wage demanded would ruin the industry. The minimum rate has already been tried in certain pits with fatal results. From the nature of the miner's work effective supervision is impossible. Thus the lazy man can shirk or malinger with impunity and reduco the output of the pit. It is said, indeed, by certain of tho miners' leaders that the obvious course is for employers to pay the minimum wage and band together to keep up the price of coal. Those who give such counsel forget that the British coal industry has already to face acute competition from without in the shape „of coal mined in Germany and the United States. And it is threatened with an even more serious form of competition by oil fuel. Even in present conditions expert opinion holds that the adoption of oil fuel instead of coal means an economic gain. If coal wero to rise several shillings a ton there would bo a general movement to substitute oil for it. In that case a large part of the Home market for the colliers' product would be permanently lost, while the entire foreign market would pass into the hands of our rivals. As Britain- exports some 60,000,000 tons of coal a year this is no small matter.