NEWS FROM MARS?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19258, 23 August 1924, Page 8

NEWS FROM MARS?

“I give the first watch of the night to the red planet Mars* . . . the star of the unconquered will.” The quotation is from Longfellow, a poet whose excessive popularity in the nineteenth century has, as is the way with reao tions, lapsed to quite undeserved depreciation in the nineteenth,—for, as Kipling (a very different genius) has pointed out to his generation, Longfellow was not a mean or negligible poet. Apart from poetry, though perhaps not apart from imaginative influences, the rod planet is the cynosure of innumerak . eyes at this week-end. Do they h«*9 week-ends in Mars? Do they gron* about the weather? Are they in tiro throes of preparation for a Big Exhi* bition? Do they realise that the first watch of the night is just now being given to them, in a spirit of aspiring curiosity, by the inhabitants of a little sphere which we, in our preposterous pride, regard as the hub of the universe ? Are they thrilled by the notion that they are closer to us than they* have been since the days when Dr Johnson and Chatham and Burke and Captain Cook were alive? May it be that, by occult wireless means, they know all about Mr Massey and Mr Wilford and Mr Holland? Perhaps they do, —we would not dogmatise on a transcendental subject. Perhaps they do not,—• and “where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly, to he wise.” The Martinars may have their own troubles, their international problems and parliamentary squabbles and sensational criminal trials. It

conceivable that the hmncmrs and controversies incident to the monthly meetings of, say, Canal Boards, may be “featured” by their daily newspapers. Or, to hint the last and most disenchanting of the many possibilities, the Martians may be non-existent, imaginary, just such insubstantial stuff as our poor terrestrial dreams are made of. The planet may be “dead,” like the moon, without the moon’s solitary legendary “man.” But we do not relish tnat idea. Pending negative proof, and hoping for positive assurance,, we shall continue to believe in the reality of those distant kinsmen, cousins very far removed, —also cherishing the convic tion that they are nob the super-intel-lectual and utterly non-moral miscreants depicted'by Mr H. G. Wells’s riotous and yot realistic fancy in “The War of the Worlds.” To-day they aro comparatively noar to us, —so near and yet so far, —and, as Mr Ramsay MacDonald says, “Let us try to get nearer to each other.”