SOME THINGS THAT DO NOT HAPPEN.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 1600, 31 May 1924, Page 16 (Supplement)

SOME THINGS THAT DO NOT HAPPEN.

How many things there are which nearly everyone fakes for granted without stopping to ask if they are true! Some of them have been stated so often that they have passed into common speech—like a bolt out of a blue sky. or a red rag to a bull, or ■burying his head in the sand like an ostrich. We. may begin with the old and very popular belief thai, hair turns white in a few hours from shock or anxiety. If is not easy to find who first set this report going. Byron, in liis Prisoner of Chillon, gave it a fine start because, he put it. in lines easily remembered: My hair is grey, hut not with years. Nor grew it while in a single, night, As men's have grown from sudden fears. Now, as far as we have been able to find oul, there is not one authenticated example of anyone, man or woman, whose hair has gone white in a single night, or in any period approaching it in brevity. Yet the superstition remains, ami is taken as a fact in a quite, record book on Antarctic exploration, where the writer, having described how a brown lemming turned white quickly when exposed to the cold, adds: "Bul, as is well-known, the hair of human beings can turn while in a night." No such tiling is well-known. There is an explanation of why hair turns

white as age comes on; but none why it should happen rapidly in people who are nol old. Sayings and beliefs such as that cannot al! be tracked very far; nor is if, easy lo say always why they are believed. But some are more easily made out than others. Does a red rag exeile a bull? Some experiments ma.de on entile have shown that bulls are colour-blind. They cannot tell red from green. On Hie other hand, even colour-blind people can tell differences of colour when two colours are placed near one another. So that a red rag. being quite a vivid spot in most surroundings, would certainly a I tract even a bull's attention. It would stand out; however colour-blind Hie bull might be, if ihe strange object were waved at him he would probably interpret it as an invitation to battle. Rut it is the rag lie minds, not its colour. Another animal with a strange habit falsely attributed to it is the ostrich. Why do people say that the ostrich buries its bead in the sand and then deludes itself with the, belief that, as it can see nothing, if cannot itself be seen? The ostrich is not such a foolish bird. 11 does not hide its' head in the sand.

How, then, did the idea arise? The same thing has been said of the Egyptian crocodile, accused of burying its snout in the mud to hide itself, and of the New Zealand, kiwi, which, it is true, sometimes supports itself on its beak. What does the ostrich do that ever made people say it buried its head in the sand? An answer is to be found in a treatise on African birds, which lias a photograph of a troop of ostriches, each over eight feet high, racing along, and another of one of them which has sunk crouching lo the ground with its long neck parallel to the surface. It would seem impossible, says the author, that a troop of ostriches like that could ever conceal itself. Yet when they sink to the ground the earth seems to have swallowed them up. In the photograph the single ostrich comes out quite clearly, but on an open plain, studded with anthills, as so many African plains are. Ihe birds lying down are practically indistinguishable from the ant-hills, and in the course of a few million years the ostriches being wise and nol foolish, have learned the fact. Some notions are harder to account for than that. Many people will tell you that the sun puts the lire, out. But does it? It does not. Anyone can see thai Ihe fire appears to burn less brightly when the sun shines on lhe grate, bul il is not the sun that is putting the tire out. One, explanation is that when the, . sun's rays are not on the (ire the red glow is all radiated, bul when the bright light shines on Hie coals if. is reflected from all but the black pads (which absorb il), and so the radiation from the red glow is obscured; it does not look so bright. It is also quite likely that when the Sun is shining, outside the room as well as in, there is more likely lo be a downdraught in the chimney. Some odd beliefs, like the danger of night air, die hard; and many people are still doubtful whether if is safe to sit in a draught. A few will still say that it is the way to catch cold. As a matter of practice we sit in draughts very much more than we used to do. Since the motor car came people have been used to sifting for hours at a time in bigger draughts than their grandfathers ever dreamed of. Do they catch more colds? The younger generation would emphatically say no! and, being well informed, would add that a cold is caused by a germ, which a draught is more likely to blow away I ban to bring. Sir Douglas Mawson and other Antarctic explorers lived for months in blizzards that blew eighty miles an hour and never caught colds. Yet, if germs are. about, sitting in a draught might possibly lower the body's resistance,, or make the surfaces of Ihe inner nostrils or throat more likely lo develop germs which had found a. lodging there. Also It is

quite certain that among many people the lowered skin temperature brought J about by, a cold draught will bring on an attack of muscular rheumatism. It may take them at the back of the ! neck, shoulders, or small of the back. There are one or two superstitions about the body, some quite wrong j some merely odd. One of the oddest is a very old one with the novelisls, j who will tell their readers that the I heroine had an attack of brain • fever; I she sometimes dies of it, and it is j said to be very common among stu- J dents working hard for an examiu- . alion. But the doctors say there is , no such thing as brain fever. The. j brain cannot' have a fever. It is not possible. The nearest approach to the novelist's symptoms are the de- j lusions which patients suffer when in ! a high fever from typhoid, pneumonia, and so on. Rut they are not more de- j luded than the novelist isThe thunder-bolt that is said to burst out of the clear sky is simple. There is no such thing as a thunder- | bolt. In old limes the fossils known I as belemniles were called thunder- j bolts, and that belief lasted a long j time. Also it is certain that a few] meteoric slonos, in falling out of the sky, have come to Earth with a loud crash. The testimony about the sound is not very good, but, at any rate, thunder and lightning had nothing to do with it.