DUST OF THE PAST

Taranaki Daily News, 31 March 1934, Page 13 (Supplement)

DUST OF THE PAST

discoveries in science

(By

“Historicus.”)

It was merely natural that as soon as man emerged from the ranks of the beasts he should gaze up at the heavens and become conscious of the Great Mystery The birth of curiosity is the birth of science. Just how the earth was formed is knowledge that may be had by any present day schoolboy for the trouble of asking, but interest must remain in the men who laid the foundations of the great structure of exact knowledge that is to-day the heritage of every man who possesses will and application to inquire. Pierre Simon de Laplace is perhaps the greatest scientific figure of his age. In 1796 he added fame to an already famous name in the science of applied mathematics by the postulation of his famous nebular hypothesis of astronomy. The problem of just how the earth came into being had long engaged the attention of science. Laplace conceived the idea that the sun had been of greater size in earlier ages. He visualised it as a huge, gaseous cloud rotating at ever-increasing speed, at intervals flinging off matter that ultimately formed the planets, and which continued to revolve round the parent body more or less in the same place and at the same speed. The hypothesis is no longer accepted, yet the process imagined has proved to be of the very greatest importance in theoretical astronomy. Laplace, in attempting to solve the mystery of the children, had explained unconsciously how the parent itself was bom. The son of a small farmer and bom in comparative poverty, Laplace had, however, become famous at the age of 20. He became professor of mathematics in the military school at Paris and examined the youthful Napoleon for his artillery commission. Despite Laplace’s failure in the political life of his time, he remained a favourite of France’s greatest soldier until the end.

Hans Christian Oersted died in March, 1851. In this instance we are farther along the road to exact knowledge. Dr. Gilbert had named the force, electricity. Stephen Gray had found that matter could be divided into two classes—that which could be electrified by friction and that which could not. Dufray had discovered the law of attraction and repulsion. The Leyden jar had been made and perfected. Benjamin Franklin had discovered the fact that electricity and lightning were one and the same thing. Then came the revolutionary discoveries of Galvani and Volta. The old idea of electrical production gave place to a new method. With the perfection of Volta’s battery men found that they could produce electricity at will, control it, and use it. Then, 20 years later, in 1820, the greatest step of all was made in the progress of electrical science. Hans Christian Oersted, after years of experiment, discovered and proved a relationship between magnetism and electricity. He discovered the existence of the magnetic field about a charged plate or wire. Not until that time was the power of electricity made fully available for the use of man. The proof that electricity produced magnetism and magnetism electricity soon led to the conception that any form of mechanical power could be changed into electricity. It was left to Faraday, however, to conceive from Oersted’s discovery the famous experiment that led to the production and perfection of the dynamo—the heart of modem performance.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, .the greatest sculptor since Phidias the Athenian, and all but the greatest of painters, was born in March, 1475. A more remarkable figure has never existed in the history of art and science. He is the crux of the Renaissance, the first and greatest artist to emerge after a thousand. years of barbarism. A native of the city of Florence, he was put out to nurse at an early age into the household of a stone-cutter where he learned to love the smoothness of white marble and resolved to create beautiful things from it. First he studied painting in the studio of a Florentine master, where he was a fellow student of Torregiano who broke his nose in a brawl and disfigured him with the forehead ridge that posterity called “the bar of Michelangelo.” From Florence Michelangelo went to Rome and worked for the College of Cardinals as a sculptor, but Florence called him home again to carve his immortal David from a huge, thin block of marble that an elder sculptor had bungled and abandoned. Pope Julius 11. engaged him to design a great funeral chapel, providing both sculpture and architectural design. The project secured for the world some of the greatest masterpieces of sculpture of all time, but the chapel itself was never completed. Michelangelo was unwillingly diverted to do the mural paintings in the Sistine Chapel, where the frescoes remain to this day, the marvel of all who see them and the criterion and standard of how figures must be distributed on square and curved surfaces to maintain a balanced unity of composition. They are' an immortal exposition of how the play of muscles and gesture in the human subject can be emphasised without disturbing the serene unity of an artist’s conception. But Michelangelo must always be remembered for his sculptures, heroic in scale and conception, unhesitating in execution, afire with life and emotion. He has been the example of all craftsmen from his own to Rodin's day, for he broke away from tradition and substituted for the “two dimensional” Gothic school the classic traditions of reality, unity and completeness in composition.

“Is thy servant dog that he should do this thing?” .asked Sydney Smith when someone urged him to have his portrait painted by Sir Edwin Landseer. The twentieth century has little sympathy for humanised dogs with pathetic eyes. If they must be humanised, let them be Bonzos and Dismal Desmonds. His association with animal portraiture has ruined Landseer’s reputation as an artist—for modern people at any rate. But perhaps the time will come when Landseer will be recognised for what he really was, a great draughtsman with a quick eye for pose in man and beast and a harmonious palette. A little study of the Landseer technique in perspective would do the world of good to most non-Georgian artists. At least he was a high priest of realistic proportion and correct distance values in painting. As for the lions Landseer made to guard the base of the Nelson column in Trafalgar Square—the placid, comfortable lions all Londoners know so well—the explanation of the good-natured character is simple. The Zoo sent Landseer the carcase of a dead lion as model. It was like Landseer and his age to think that a dead lion was as good as a live one for the purposes of art. But now Landseer is a dead lion himself, but at least his physiology was sound, which cannot be said of so many who strive after the “spirit” and neglect to reproduce even ,a passable likeness of its fleshy envelope.