NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20303, 10 July 1929, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THUNDERBOLTS. That the popular belief in (he occurrence 01 thunderbolts is due to ignorance of the character and (he effects of lightning was shown recently by Sir Richard Gregory, editor bf Nature, in a letter to the Times, which had published reports that a school was struck by a thunderbolt, and (hat a thunderbolt struck a farm, finally burying itself in (he garden. '"To call a flash of lightning a thunderbolt may be permissible," he wrote, " but the suggestion that a solid healed mass passes along the track of the discharge until it reaches a building or the ground is a relic of the days before Franklin proved that lightning is an electric discharge. Nothing soiid has ever come out of a thunderstorm, though many people think they possess evidence to the contrary. What are supposed to be fragments of thunderbolts are son>ctinies fossils, sometimes fulgurites, due to the fusing of sandy'soil by an electric discharge striking it, or they may be meteorites, but they are never produced by the electricity in the air which gives rise to thunderstorms and lightning flashes. When the next thunderbolt is seen to bury itself in the ground the observer should try to recover it, and if he succeeds in securing something distinct from a fulgurite or a meteorite he will possess something unique."

THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH

"If anything absolutely new can be traced to the possession of our Empire, it must be traced to the most original feature in it, the progressive development of dependencies into independent partner nations which have nevertheless remained by the Mother Country's side and under the same Sovereign," says Sir Charles Lucas, in the introduction to the first volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Quoting tho definition of their status by tho Imperial Conference of 1926, he proceeds:—"To this (here is no parallel in history, and perhaps it would be fair to. say that, whereas the present partner nations overseas were once, hut liavo ceased to be, dependencies of Great Britain, the life of Great Britain as a nation is now, as it was not formerly, conditioned by its-partnership with these other nations. One result is that those citizens of Great Britain who think at all on political and constitutional cjiicstions are compelled now to think not only imperially, as Joseph Chamberlain counselled, but internationally—in a new sense as opposed to a conlinent-of-Europc sense. Under the old order, as' lato as Palmcrston's regime or even later, colonics marched infinitely far behind foreign Powers in the consideration of British statesmen. It is not so now. In our outlook on tlie futuro tho British Commonwealth of Nations takes the first place."

THE SCREEN AND TILE STAGE. Fill- from " killing " the theatre, (lie " talkie " will eventually make it prosperous, says the London Evening News. " They say that big (|ueues are at all Iho talkie cinemas. There wcro big queues for ' super ' pictures before talkies came. Now they are higger because everybody wants to seb this novelty. How long is curiosity to last"' Give it a year or so: ami -then the talking film will have to live on its merits, mere curiosity having been satisfied. A'id everybody in (he cinema trade itself admits that there are and will be for some time great and even appalling crudities in the talkie. As long as there arc great or even very good plays on the stage the theatres will till. No mechanical invention can ever be as attractive to the public as the great actor. No loud speaker can ever take the place of the beautiful human voice. The cinema has these great advantages over the theatre: it is more cymfortiiblf, it. is cheaper, it can give as many us sis shows a day. Then, if a single picture makes £1.000,000, t ho producers can spend £500,000 on the next: whereas >t is a gamble to spend 120.000 on a play that, may • fail in a week. Obviously the theatre cannot compete in this large financial sense with the cinema. Itut, it is not needful, that it should. All that it has to do is to offer good plays. I'liat is tli° root of the matter. The two sorts of entertainment are wanted by the public,'and it is nonsense to talk of one ' killing ' the other. There is no reason for the theatre to lay itself down and dio.''