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Otago Daily Times, Issue 18872, 26 May 1923, Page 6

The opinion has already been expressed that the war has left the average man inore sensitive to artistic , suggestion. This points to a field of inquiry whica, however, nobody seems to have exploited, 1 It is not recorded that the attendance at art galleries is greater irK tlieir postwar days than it used to be, though it is to be hoped that such is the case. We are inclined to think that while the war stimulated the artist it made little difference in, the popular attitude towards art. Yet there is the pathetic story cablet across the world respecting an Americans infatuation with a recent work by Mr Augustus Jphn. For the local public there is at present an opportunity of showing its quickenpd interest in art |>y visiting the Dunedin Art Gallery annual exhibition of sketches. The society is to be congratulated upon its display, which is decidedly interesting, and contains some examples of work that are distinctly creditable to the country of , their origin. Signs of renewed life on the part of the Dunedin Art School are visible in the contribution of student work forwarded by it this year after a long interval. The local Art School is well entitled to be given such opportunity of letting the people of Dunedin know what it is doing. The display representing the work of the Canterbury College School of Art may perhaps be said to have filled a gap at' these local exhibitions while the Dunedin school was under eclipse, but it has now become ,a superfluity. The aggregate amount of art school work shown is excessive, «nd a result- is a serious overcrowding of other exhibits. After all, we suppose the aim of the, Otago 'Art Gallery Society il particularly to encourage art in Otago, and it seems a reasonable view that it is not adopting a course most favourable to this objective in laying itself out to attract as large a collection as possible of wore from all parts of the dominion. The kindred societies representing other provinces are very careful, we understand not to let their accommodation 'bs swamped with outside contributions.

The shadow of Sir Eric Geddes’s- massive and masterful personality is not so imminent nowadays as it was in the' later period of the war and the early pcrio 1 of the peace; but the eminent economist still takes an active interest in the class of affairs which he has made peculiarly his own. He and Sir Robert Horn}, both out of official employment, spoke afa luncheon at Manchester on March 37 in connection with the Federation of British Industries. ■ er The ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer observed that there was a prevalent idea that Sir Eric was a tyrant of whom the treasury had been the victim. It is quite true, he continued, that Sir Erie Geddes Vdl go down to history as • the wielder of the axe, but you must remember that it was I who appointed him. He really came to my assistance and received an ardent welcome from the Treasury, For weeks and months he sat under our fig-tree. In the end the Treasury presented him,at your expense with a silver inkstand to remind him how, much ink he had spilled on our behalf, and some irreverent junior member of the Treasury, when he departed, wrote his epitaph in these lines: When at creation God was faced With earth’s illimitable waste. We are informed that what He said is “May there be light,” and there was Geddes. Of course the volatile junior was making play with Pope’s famous epitaph on Nenton. When it came to Sir Eric's turn he preluded "his graver remarks with an allusion to a subacid pleasantry oh the part of Sir Robert Horne’s successor. * Mr Stanley Baldwin had likened Sir Eric’s zeal for economy to the case of an elderly man marrying a young wife after leading a fast life, and had expressed a hope that he might be “best man”' at the wedding. “I appreciate his kindness,"’ said Sir Eric, “but the best man is never a married man, and I hope that before long he will see the wisdom of wedding the fair lady Economy himself; his love for her is apparently, from, all we can judge, insufficient to make him desire a similar close alliance to the one with which he twits me—an alliance which I admit without admitting a rife of evil doing.” “There is no such thing as cold; what we intend when cold is spoken of as an entity is the absence of heat. ’ Reflection , on this scientific fact may possibly ser/e as a potent solace during the ensuing winter, which has already sent forth its harbingers. It is cited apropos to the death, on March 27, of Sir James Dewar, one of the greatest masters of- physics of his time, who produced ice from liquid air,—though that was not his most notable achievement. He has been styled the hero of the romance of liquid air. His ivor.: in the conversion of gases into liquids was a continuation of Faraday's remarkable experiments at an .earlier period. Faraday’s notable conversions did

not include the liquefaction of the three elements, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. That task was left for Dewar to perform. “Many a time,” observes the Daily Telegraph in an interesting memoir, “the Friday evening meetings >f the Koyal Institution have been highly important, introducing to the public something new in science. That of June 5, 1885, was a classic gathering. I 1 or the first time liquid air was exhibited m public. Sir James Dewar had by one successful effort overcome the resistance of two of the elementary gases that defied Faraday —nitrogen and oxygen. These gases form the great bulk of the atmosphere, and it was a triumph of science to show that as steam can ne condensed into water, so the air we bi'cathe can be converted into a similar bquid,” Next, in 1893, came the prodne tion, already mentioned, of air-ice; and live years later the long-desired mastery of tire third element, hydrogen, was secured. There were certain properties of this gas which made some of the most eminent chemists despair of its condensation. It is, for instance, the lightest subptanco known. Clerk Maxwell said: “This gas has never been liquefied, and probably it never will be, ns the attractive force in hydrogen is so weak.” Faraday thought it just nossible, and if it were solidified he imagined, as Dalton and Graham had done, that it would shine with a metallic lustre. Forty-six years later, in 1898—the Fullerian professor, working in Faraday’s laboratory, had transformed hydrogen to n liquid, and in 1E99 into a solid. Sir James Dewar, like so many other eminent scientists of his earlier period, was a Scotsman; and yet, by the irony of fame, he was not the most celebrated Scottish “Dewar.” There are liquids and liquids.