THEN AND NOW.

Colonist, Volume LII, Issue 12765, 5 February 1910, Page 4

THEN AND NOW.

How few of us are sufficiently grate- : ful for the times in which we live! | Think of all the material and mechanical advantages we enjoy over tho ! ancients, who, with all their boasted ' civilisation, their arts and sciences, ' went from their cradle to their grave utterly ignorant of clocks, pocket- ! handkerchiefs, trousers, and bonnets, I or even those demi-anciemts, our great-grandfathers, who would have regarded a barometer as an instru- , ment of Beelzebub ! ■ j How differently history might have ! been written, writes E. S. Valentine in the 'Strand Magazine," if Julius Caesar had snatched a couple of Colt's : double barrelled revolvers from his tunic and shot Casca and his fellowI conspirators dead on the spot! What ; a tremendous advantage it would hav e j given Xenophon and the retreating Ten Thousand to have seized a line of railway from Persia to the Hellespont with fast steamers to Attica and Laconical The people of Pericles' day were not wliolly destitute of ingenious appliances for use and amusement, but, for some 'reason, or other which posterity cannot exactly explain", the- Athenian populace knew •not the delectable joys of the Flip-flap and the charms of the Scenic Railway were to them a dosed book. Yet we can picture the scene which would have astonished iEschylus and tude deserting the fields and mighty tude deserting the fields and groves to flock about the latest sensation, a mighty engine of balance brought intc Hellas .by. the-' Western magician, Imreiis Kiralfos. What an excellent subject for Satire this adventure of the Athenians would furnish later to Aristophanes, and how rude delineations of the apparatus would delighi modern scholars and invite oompari«ons with the screw of Archimedes^ To be so near the brink of mechanical revolution and yet to retreat aiiei all into Cimmerian ignorance. A little more and the apparatus might havt fed to the railway, the hydraulic lift; and the skyscraper!