PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3775, 20 July 1926, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

|IVom Saturday’* Otago DaSj Timet). We are all accomplices in the annual University Saturnalia, lining the streets to look on and taking pleasure therein. The students, of course, are entitled to their Horace tag, “Mingle with your serious work a little frivolity, a pleasant thing it is to play the fool on occasion.” Misoe stultitiam oonsiliis brevem, Dulce est desipere in loco. The University motto, “Sapere aude,” Dare to be wise, in pappiug week reads "Desipere aude,” dare to be unwise and on occasion to play the fool. On this occasion the students have played the fool in an eminently foolish way and to our entire satisfaction. Better done it could haTdly be. Time was when the official capping and the unofficial fun-making were conglomerated, to the advantage of neither. In old Knox Church schoolroom we had the Chancellor and a newly-appointed profeasor, fresh from Scotland, holding the platform under a persistent fusillade from atudenta armed with pea-ahootsrs. From time to time, as the peas rattled about him, the Chancellor would rise with uplifted arms in the manner of a atage conepirator taking the oath. In vain! Machine-gun fire carried the day. Also, we had a speaker of distinction in both law and politics chivied beyond endurance

and threatening to call in the police. In theory, if not precise! v in fact—as Ihe Rev. Dr Merrington can testify—all this s now ended or mended. Left to themselves, without rebuke the students may spread their revels ove'r half a week. At what cost? At the cost of half a term? The examinations will show. It will all come out in the wash. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages who debated liow many angels could dance on the point of a needle would to-day be quite at home in the science class room. Science lias nothing to say about angels, but, as we know, it can offer some staggering information about atoms. An atom is infinitesimally small; a million atoms might dance on the point of a needle, and billions on a pin’s head. Jt follows that nobody has ever seen an atom, not even under the microscope; none the less lias its internal economy been penetrated. “It is know’ll that within a single atom there are minute particles travelling at a speed of several hundred thousand miles a second.” Mark the confident tone—“it is known !” And on the top of what is known is what may be guessed:— The atom may be another world such as ours, quite as large or quite as small; it is all purely relative. Here truly is a great thought. A million worlds such as ours may be dancing on the point of a needle, worlds with kings and parliaments, wars and strikes, test matches and capping carnivals, all as real as our own. If the world we inhabit were suddenly transformed into a Lilliput, we shouldn’t know ourselves to be pigmies; if it were suddenly transformed into a Brobdingnag, we shouldn’t know ourselves to be giants. I is “all purely relative.” This seems to be the science of to-day, and before it we may humble our minds. Personally lam no sceptic;—l try to* believe. But I have given up trying to understand.

Science is equally staggering, or even more so, when dealing with vastness. Raving politics, never at rest —as this poor world’s pale history runs, — What !s it all but a trouble of ants in tbe gleam of a million million of suns? We can accept that; it is poetry, and doesn’t pretend* to be science. We may go a step further. Put down a sixpence in the middle of the Carisbrook recreation ground; let the sixpence represent the solar system—the sun a point in the centre, the outermost planet travelling round the rim. On the same scale the nearest fixed star would be at the boundary fence, the next nearest at the distance of Invercargill or Christchurch. Let that be so. But when astronomical science begins to flourish its measuring stick we are left gasping. A “lightyear” is the measuring stick. Light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a second; how many seconds are there in a year? Figure it out; —60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in the day, 365 days in the year; multiply the total by 186,000, and you get a row of figures as long as your arm —the number of miles in a light-year. Now there are certain variable stars in the smaller Magellan Cloud—at the winter season in New Zealand high over head—that are “about a million light-years away.” No one of us can have counted a million, or is able to realise what a million means. But in astronomy millions are tossed about like tennis balls. The mass of the sun is “two thousand million million million million tons ”; loses by radiation “ two hundred and fifty million tons a minute”; yet will probably last for “fifteen million million years.” Far be it from me to deny the fact; but I can’t help wondering how they find it out.

All Otago Scot after musing on Burns’s Jennie wlio “ draiglet ” her petticoats in coming through the rye: — Dear “ Civis,” —Women folks have to make great changes in their accoutrements. Lately they were carrying umbrellas about the length of a tent pole, now they have them rather like a small pair of bellows with the point broken off. By the way. did you see the Russian dancer perform? When I was a young man probably I would have gone to Bee her, as then it was something of a rarity to see any part of a woman’s legs, their dress reached “ right dowry to the ground.” I daresay I am somewhat out of date and unable to appreciate high art, but it seemed rather curious to me to hear of crowds of men and women, many of them not young, rushing, sometimes in rain, to see a woman, not young, pirouetting round on one foot, and the other as high in the air as she could get it. I wonder if any of them would be reminded of the witches’ dance in “ Auld Kirk Aloway,” and the poet’s remarkr to the enraptured Tam o’Shanter: Now Tam! O Tam! had they been Queans, A’ plump and strappin’ in their teens, etc., etc., etc. Turn it up, and when found make a note of. Step dancing by a single performer, man or woman, has been open to adverse criticism since the incident of King David’s dancing before the ark. Being a man, King David might have kicked as high as he liked, one would suppose. But Michal, liis principal wife, witnessing the performance, was shocked and pained. They “bad words”; and the chronicler significantly adds—“ Therefore Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child unto the day of Iter death.” From Oamaru:— Dear “Civis,” —Will you kindly tell me the origin and meaning of the word ** peter ” in the sentence —“ The • quantity is short, and will soon * peter out’ altogether”? , As to origin, the dictionaries are shy—commenting by a question mark (?) or by the symbol “etm. dub.” Having no responsibilities, I suggest that we may go back to “ jietere,” which means to explode, strictly to,make a small Explosion. A dying squib goes off diminuendo in a series of small explosions,—it peters out. And the phrase has been transferred to any similar process of gradually giving out and coining to an end. This is the best that I can do for you. Also from Oamaru:— Dear “ Civis,” —Would you kindly give a decision in respect to the following question: “ Which is the greater novelist, Conrad or Galsworthy? ” By “decision” I mean something emphatically definite —no side-stepping, but a straight out “squasher ” one way or the other. The “ squasher ” merited by this correspondent must be that his question is absurd. “ Comparisons are odious,” a maxim familiar to all commentators on life and manners, is centuries old both in our own literature and elsewhere. Thus in Cervantes (Don Quixote speaking) : “Softly good Signor Montesinbs; comparisons you know are odious, and therefore let them be spared, I beseech you. The peerless Dulcipea is what she is, and the lady Donna Balerma is what she is, and there let it rest.” Wise words. It was sufficient that each lady was peerless in the eyes of her own devotee. Choice between any two persons or things turns an your own intelligence and taste. If you prefer the Hottentot Venus to the Venus of Milo, it will be because you are not a white man and a European, but a South African

savage. “ Chacun a son gout,” say the French; even so, echoes the old woman, kissing her cow; —each to his taste. Which is the better, a potato or a peach ? If it is potato that you want, a potato is the better ; if you want peach, a peach is the better. Neither can be a substitute for the other. You don’t dish up peaches with roast mutton, nor serve potatoes for dessert. Each is good, better, best in its own way. All this is to say that comparisons are odious, and that not seldom they are ridiculous. In a letter that I have mislaid and cannot quote, a correspondent asked if it is true that the Scotish people came into Scotland from Ireland. The answer is, Yes—if we may believe the books. The early settlers in and about the Firth of Clyde, coming from somewhere in Europe, we know not where,* and calling themselves Scots, we know not why, stopped for a time in Ireland on their way. Other early settlers were the Piets, or painted people, and the Cymri or Britons—Ceils all three. But much of this is guesswork. The historian of times before history began has to make bricks without straw. Certain it is, however, that the Scots were in Ireland before they wrere in Scotland, and that for some centuries one of the names of Ireland was Scotia. The Scots moved on from Ireland, but they left their traces behind them. Belfast is as Scottish as Glasgow, perhaps more Scottish, for the population of Glasgow includes a large contingent of unassimilated Irish Roman Catholics. If my correspondent is an Ulster man, he may say that he comes from that part of Scotland called the North of Ireland. Since there is mention of Ulster, we may remind ourselves that in those parts early July is a lively time. The first of the month, Battle of the Boyne; the twelfth, Battle of Augrim, a far more sanguinary affair than the Boyne. On these great Protestant anniversaries the Orangeman endues his favourite flower, the orange lily, which, if he should meet a Ribbonman with a green ribbon in his- buttonhole, is as good as saying, “Will it please you to tread on the tail of my coat?'* Then, if a street riot follows and the shillelagh is in play, the Donnybreok rule holds, Wherever you see a head hit it In southern Ireland to mention the Battle of the Boyne is as much as your life b» worth. Charles Lever tells of a Father Malachi, somewhere in County Clare, holding a “station,”—3o or 40 peasant farmers gathered round the social board, and of a chance visitor, the adjutant ol an English regiment, being pressed to con tribute a song. Reluctantly complying, lie struck up “The Boyne Water,” perhaps the only song he knew. He had just reached the word “battle” in the second line, when, as if the word suggested it, it seemed the signal for a general engagement. Decanters, glasses, iugs, candlesticks flew right and left, all intended it is true for the head of the luckless adjutant, but as they now and then missed their aim, and came in contact with the wrong man. invariably provoked retaliation. and in a very few minutes the battle became general. A stout farmer who had got the adjutant down on the floor was using a quart pot to take a pewter cast of his features. With difficulty the victim escaped from the room and the original proceedings were able to proceed. “They are all like lambs now,” said Father Malachi, “for they don’t believe there’s a whole bone in his body.” Sinn Fein has come in since Charles Lever’s day, and politics have superseded religion. But it would be rirky to evoke old memories bv whistling “The Boyne Water.” I should prefer to vocalise on Mr Seddon’s after-dinner favourite, “The Wearing of the Green.” Civis.