SCIENTISTS AT PLAY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 278, 24 November 1931, Page 3

SCIENTISTS AT PLAY

DAY’S VARIED OUTINGS. DOZEN DIFFERENT JOY-RIDES. More than a thousand of the scientists who were recently attending tae British Association meetings in London took a holiday one fine day. They assembled like a huge Sunday school treat at South Kensington, tumbled into motor-coaches and rolled off on a dozen different joy rides. One party numbering nearly 500 visited the London Air Park at Hanworth. Grey-bearded professors gaped in astonishment as Fiying Urticer Leech looped his machine “inside-out” in a display of crazy fiying which defied all lecture-room principles. Another party donned hobnailed boots and went hiking over the Chiltern Hills and over the chalk and sandstone downs of Surrey, forming wonderful geo'.ogical theories as to how England happened. Y’et another party went to the Whipsnade Zoo. But the elephants resolutely refused to show their back teeth to allow the 235 zoologists in the party a chance to test Professor Fairfield Osborn’s theory that they show man to be nine million years older than he was thought to be. Again, there are no monkeys at Whipsnade, so the scientists got no farther with the missing link business. Sir Oliver Lodge made some amusing experiments when delivering his address on wireless communications. He took a rod and nibbed it briskly with a flannel. **l am transferring electrons from the flannel to the rod,” he explained. Then, placing the rod against his snow-white hair, he made it stand on end stiffly. Then Sir Oliver marking his audience jump by suddenly making fearsomelooking sparks come from an electric apparatus. After a tribute to modern scientists, he said that the glow-worm knew how to do things that human beings did not.