NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18530, 15 October 1923, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

A ROMANCE IN CONCRETE. r- • : Millions of money are : being expended on its : construction, and next year it is expected that; twenty million people will pass the turnstiles, says Sir John Foster Fraser, writing of the British Empire i Exhibition. Because of the things they will' see, maybe they will have no time :to think of the task of building the exhibition. But just as the building of a mighty ship stimulates the imagination more than the completed vessel, I will always marvel over the building of the exhibition. A great undulating stretch of green Middlesex a year ago and now, as though some wizard of organisation had been busy, there is daily rising, lean and stark at first, and then clad and ennobled with architectural beauty, a city like some captivating tale out of the Arabian Nights. Some day there will be a poet who will sing the praises of concrete. Thousands of men are busy erecting dignified buildings of colossal span that look liko carved squares of everlasting stone: concrete. There are stately pillared arcades: all concrete. ' Giant pillars give entrance to the halls: concrete again. Thero is a bridge spanning the waist of la lake, and reminding one of the Rialto: concrete, of course. The roofing, besides acres of glass, looks liko slate, but it is canvas dipped in concrete. Admire the splendid mast-like flagstaffs, thousands of them, but they are,all thin rods of iron swathed in concrete • Wembley to-day is a triumph of organisation. There is clamour, but no confusion. Imaginative as well as shrewd brains have laid the plans-—nothing is forgotten—and with almost uncanny, celerity the -city grows. I stand transfixed looking upon the scene, and recalling that last year hero were meadows where cows lazily wandered. Next year it will be the centre of the world, for it will be a paean of the British Empire, and men of all races and all colours and all faiths who live beneath the Union Jack will come to it and be proud. But I, for one, will often think of the mastery shown this year in turning a vision into a fact.

MAKING AMERICA THINK.

A storm op criticism was . directed against Lord Birkenhead for his" references at Williarastown to President Wilson and American foreign policy. "Is Lord Birkenhead a visitor to the United States who committed a blunder, or is he a great surgeon who has performed a remarkable trephining operation on the American skull?" asked the Toronto Star. "The American people want to revero Wilson without doing anything that he wanted them to do. Birkenhead came along, and in polished sentences, beautifully contrived, put it to them that Wilson was either a great leader whom a people not great failed to follow, or he was a visionary person whose leadership a great people could not trust.' They can't have it both ways. Wilson was cither a great man or he wasn't. If he was, then the United States, which defeated him and his policies, was wrong, arid persists in remaining in the wrong. If the United States was right in rejecting his policies and in continuing to do so, then Wilson was altogether in the wrong. By assuming, as why should he not. that Wilson's policies having been entirely rejected by his own country, were by them thought to bo' mistaken ones, Birkenhead has brought the American people face to face with themselves in this matter. He has set them thinking. ,He has produced activity in brain cells that hadn't moved for years. Oh the whole, we incline to the belief that lie is a great surgeon, and that ho crossed the" "ocean expressly to perform this operation." : ;:

THE CHANNEL TUNNEL.

Enthusiasm for the project of constructing a tunnel beneath the English Channel from England to France has not been stifled by delay and disappointment. The Tunnel Committee of the House of Commons recently met and elected Sir William Bull to the chairmanship, in the place of Sir Arthur Fell, owing to the retirement of tho latter from Parliamentary activities. At the'same time, the chief engineer of the Channel Tunnel, Sir Tempest, joint general manager of the Southern Railway Company, issued a memorandum briefly referring to several important features, particularly of engineering and geological interest. It states that the stratum of chalk marl—chalk largely infiltrated with . clay—through which it is proposed to cut the tunnel, is continuous from Dover to Calais, and maintains its shape for a long time after cutting. Its imperviousness to water is evidenced by the fact that, in the trial heading of over a mile long, only three gallons of water per minute were met. It is proposed to lino the tunnels with reinforced The total cost of construction at present-day prices is placed at £29,000,000. A new boring machine has been constructed, which bores a heading 12ft. diameter at tho rate of 120 ft. a day. Tin's corresponds to a mile 'in 10 weeks, so that, working from opposite sides, machines would meet in about 2£ years, or, allowing six months for sinking the shafts, in three years from the inception of the work. Such a heading would demonstrate the feasibility of the whole scheme, and, in addition, would allow the main tunnels to bo attacked at several different points, considerably reducing the time required for the execution of the main portion of the work. The removal of tho excavated material would be effected by mixing it with water and pumping it out. «j

PROOF OF IMMORTALITY.

Mr. Thomas Edison seems ageless— abiding phenomenon in a mechanical and scientific age, says the London Daily Telegraph. The most transcendent discovery could be attributed to him to-morrow, and few of us would have the hardihood to doubt the truth of it. The latest news of his doings is that ho is applying his genius to trying to discover where the souls of men abide after death. All his thought and energy are lent' to the solution of the problem. But so far he has not found it possible to demonstrate so much as the existence of life beyond. Che grave. Nothing is more certain than the fact of death, yet the man who orders his lifo and plans his affairs as one who may bo dead to-morrow is practically nonexistent. But the man who in his heart believes that his soulthe very man - himself—will_ cease to be at the moment of physical death is almost as rare. There are some things in lute the " proof " of which is of little more than academic interest. Suppose Mr. Edison were to offer scientific proof that there is no life for the soul hereafter; wooj,d it. convince any but a few that in this matter the unvarying law of the universe was broken; that there was, after all, waste and destruction ? To bo suro, our whole conception of the universe is changing. There is reason to believe that every spoken word, and perhaps every thought, lives on for ever. The sounds of the human voice have, it is said been transmitted by wireless waves and detected a fortnight afterwards by wireless receivers. ' With instruments ! fine enough to perceive them; sound waves might similarly be detected an indefinite ago after their first formation. Such, at any rate, is the theory. Beside it the thought that the soul of man can cease utterly seems more than ever untenable. Whatever Mr. Edison's researches disclose, this much is certain—man's belief in personal immortality will not. bo shaken if tho scientist fails .to find "scientific" proof, and scarcely at all confirmed if he does. I