新概念4.note

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新概念 4

nce4_01.txt

We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where

people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even

now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to

recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers

to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about

migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they

did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian

peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people

explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.

But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their

sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor

legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.

Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, be-

cause this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood

and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of

long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have

disappeared without trace.

nce4_02.txt

Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends ? Because they destroy so

many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human

race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would

devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection

we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat

insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed

by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do

the least harm to us or our belongings.

Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them.

One can tell the difference almost at a glance for a spider always has eight legs

and an insect never more than six.

How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf ? One authority on

spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and

he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre, that is something

like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for

at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the

wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content

with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the in-

sects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total

weight of all the human beings in the country.

T. H. GILLESPIE Spare that Spider from The Listener

nce4_03.txt

Modern alpinists try to climb mountains by a route which will give them good

sport, and the more difficult it is, the more highly it is regarded. In the pioneering

days, however, this was not the case at all. The early climbers were looking for

the easiest way to the top because the summit was the prize they sought, especi-

ally if it had never been attained before. It is true that during their explorations

they often faced difficulties and dangers of the most perilous nature, equipped

in a manner which would make a modern climber shudder at the thought, but

they did not go out of their way to court such excitement. They had a single aim,

a solitary goal--the top!

It is hard for us to realize nowadays how difficult it was for the pioneers. Ex-

cept for one or two places such as Zermatt and Chamonix, which had rapidly

become popular, Alpine villages tended to be impoverished settlements cut off

from civilization by the high mountains. Such inns as there were were generally

dirty and flea-ridden; the food simply local cheese accompanied by bread often

twelve months old, all washed down with coarse wine. Often a valley boasted no

inn at all, and climbers found shelter wherever they could--sometimes with the

local priest (who was usually as poor as his parishioners), sometimes with shep-

herds or cheesemakers. Invariably the background was the same: dirt and

poverty, and very uncomfortable. For men accustomed to eating seven-course

dinners and sleeping between fine linen sheets at home, the change to the Alps

must have been very hard indeed.

nce4_04.txt

several cases have been reported recently of people who

can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors

and walls. One case concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who

has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her

skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father. One

day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a

locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers

locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.

Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute

in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a

series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian

Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through

an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of

Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in an-

other instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the

outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments

showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these

tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfold she lacked the

ability to perceive things with her skin. lt was also found that although she

could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands

were wet.

nce4_05.txt

The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one

knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured,

and imprisoned, in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history

museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scien-

tists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and

the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) link

with our ancestral past.

Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photo-

graph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid,

has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the

dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two

expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals he

loved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or

how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the

family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many

other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French

explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century

ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the

Himalayas is hardly more elusive.

nce4_06.txt

People are always talking about' the problem of youth '. If there is one--which

I take leave to doubt--then it is older people who create it, not the young them-

selves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all

human beings--people just like their elders. There is only one difference be-

tween an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before

him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where

the rub is.

When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain--that I was

a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded

as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives

you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged

in seeking.

I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a

dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious

social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems tO

me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some

sense cosmic beings in violent an lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.

All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill-

mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary

cliches about respect for elders--as if mere age were a reason for respect. I

accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he

is wrong.

nce4_07.txt

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill be-

tween the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet

one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on

the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936

Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies

of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win,

and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village

green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it

is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of

prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be dis-

graced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who

has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level

sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of

the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the

nations. who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously

believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball

are tests of national virtue.

nce4_08.txt

Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and

home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made,

washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned or preserved,

bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals

can be had at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.

It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home,

and his children rarely, if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore

seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have

a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often

earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In

textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but this

practice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not un-

usual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment

having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning

and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant

figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother works

economic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if

mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they

return from school.

nce4_09.txt

Not all sounds made by animals serve as language, and we have only to turn to

that extraordinary discovery of echo-location in bats to see a case in which the

voice plays a strictly utilitarian role.

To get a full appreciation of what this means we must turn first to some recent

human inventions. Everyone knows that if he shouts in the vicinity of a wall or

a mountainside, an echo will come back. The further off this solid obstruction

the longer time will elapse for the return of the echo. A sound made by tapping

on the hull of a ship will be reflected from the sea bottom, and by measuring the

time interval between the taps and the receipt of the echoes the depth of the

sea at that point can be calculated. So was born the echo-sounding apparatus,

now in general use in ships. Every solid object will reflect a sound, varying ac-

cording to the size and nature of the object. A shoal of fish will do this. So it is a

comparatively simple step from locating the sea bottom to locating a shoal of

fish. With experience, and with improved apparatus, it is now possible not only

to locate a shoal but to tell if it is herring, cod, or other well-known fish, by the

pattern of its echo.

A few years ago it was found that certain bats emit squeaks and by receiving

the echoes they could locate and steer clear of obstacles--or locate flying insects

on which they feed. This echo-location in bats is often compared with radar, the

principle of which is similar.

nce4_10.txt

In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The mani-

pulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy com-

mittee men regard them with horror, knowing that no pigeonholes can be found

for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life--if

only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy--but where are they? We

are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling

to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the

handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without

ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society,

capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appoint-

ments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them. Between mid-

night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache,

I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of

people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not

an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. The twin ideals

of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.

nce4_11.txt

Alfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a

minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were welcome everywhere. They

were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned

many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic

tricks and simple conjuring.

While Alfred's little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself

set out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the commander of the Danish in-

vaders. These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred

went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the self-

confidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived

well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected

women as well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.

Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force

there assembled was trivial compared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had

deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle : and that their

commissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.

So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried

the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His

patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred

began a long series of skirmishes--and within a month the Danes had sur-

rendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!

nce4_12.txt

What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness. This

is compensated for by an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually

takes the form of truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting,

the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the

essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of

the plots. The houses look like houses, the streets look like streets; the people

look and talk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and moti-

vation. Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor

in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb

the profits, nor the entertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent

them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear.

In addition to the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera,

which at times seems magical. But of what human import is all this skill, all this

effort, all this energy in the production of effects, when the story, the representa-

tion of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish ?

nce4_13.txt

Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once

knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruth-

lessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the

change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old

courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed

Steel, great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past

Magdalen and the University Church. Loads of motor-engines are hurried

hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no

interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors,

compression ratios and camshafts.

Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new

and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children.

It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out

and transform the lives of the workers. That this has not happened may be the

fault of the university, for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend to

live in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planet

which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever the fault may

lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which

is on the verge of extinction, and the only fruit of the combination of industry

and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets, and a pathetic

sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.

nce4_14.txt

Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justi-

fication for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be

killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been

cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known

human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do,

the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it-

so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more

impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes in-

creasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should

be like a river--small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing

passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider,

the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any

visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual

being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from

the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And it, with the

decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome.

I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what

I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been

done.

nce4_15.txt

When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money,

repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a

cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the banker-customer relationship

is that of debtor and creditor--who is which depending on whether the cus-

tomer's account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically

simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to

one another. Many of these obligations can give rise to problems and complica-

tions but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot complain that

the law is loaded against him.

The bank must obey its customer's instructions, and not those of anyone else.

When, for example, a customer first opens an account, he instructs the bank to

debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn by himself.He gives the bank

specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no

right or authority to pay out a customer's money on a cheque on which its cus-

tomer's signature has been forged.It makes no difference that the forgery may

have been a very skilful one: the bank must recognize its customer's signature.

For this reason there is no risk to the customer in the modern practice, adopted

by some banks, of printing the customer's name on his cheques. If this facilitates

forgery it is the bank which will lose, not the customer.

nce4_16.txt

The deepest holes of all are made for oil,and they go down to as much as 25,000

feet. But we do not need to send men down to get the oil out, as we must with

other mineral deposits. The holes are only borings, less than a foot in diameter.

My particular experience is largely in oil, and the search for oil has done more to

improve deep drilling than any other mining activity. When it has been decided

where we are going to drill, we put up at the surface an oil derrick. It has to be

tall because it is like a giant block and tackle, and we have to lower into the

ground and haul out of th. ground great lengths of drill pipe which are rotated

by an engine at the top and are fitted with a cutting bit at the bottom.

The geologist needs to know what rocks the drill has reached, so every so often

a sample is obtained with a coring bit. It cuts a clean cylinder of rock, from which

can be seen he strata the drill has been cutting through. Once we get down to

the oil,it usually flows to the surface because great pressure, either from gas or

water,is pushing it. This pressure must be under control,and we control it by

means of the mud which we circulate down the drill pipe. We endeavour to

avoid the old, romantic idea of a gusher, which wastes oil and gas. We want it to

stay down the hole until we can lead it off in a controlled manner.

nce4_17.txt

The fact that we are not sure what 'intelligence' is, nor what is passed on, does

not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept, and placing a cer-

tain amount of reliance on tests which 'measure' it.

In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve

puzzles and problems of various kinds, and if we have taken a representative

sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will

reach in a wide variety of occupations.

This became of particular importance when, as a result of the 1944 Education

Act, secondary schooling for all became law, and grammar schools, with the ex-

ception of a small number of independent foundation schools, became available

to the whole population. Since the number of grammar schools in the country

could accommodate at most approximately 25 per cent of the total child popu-

lation of eleven-plus, some kind of selection had to be made. Narrowly academic

examinations and tests were felt, quite rightly, to be heavily weighted in favour

of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and

academically biased homes. Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this

narrow specialization, by introducing problems which were not based on specifi-

cally scholastically-acquired knowledge. The intelligence test is an attempt to

assess the general ability of any child to think, reason, judge, analyse and syn-

tiesize by presenting him with situations, both verbal and practical, which are

within his range of competence and understanding.

nce4_18.txt

Two factors weigh heavily against the effectiveness of scientific in in-

dustry. One is the general atmosphere of secrecy in which it is carried out, the

other the lack of freedom of the individual research worker. In so far as any

inquiry is a secret one, it naturally limits all those engaged in carrying it out

from effective contact with their fellow scientists either in other countries or in

universities, or even , often enough , in other departments of the same firm. The

degree of secrecy naturally varies considerably. Some of the bigger firms are en-

gaged in researches which are of such general and fundamental nature that it is a

positive advantage to them not to keep them secret. Yet a great many processes

depending on such research are sought for with complete secrecy until the stage

at which patents can be taken out. Even more processes are never patented at all

but kept as secret processes. This applies particularly to chemical industries,

where chance discoveries play a much larger part than they do in physical and

mechanical industries. Sometimes the secrecy goes to such an extent that the

whole nature of the research cannot be mentioned. Many firms, for instance,

have great difficulty in obtaining technical or scientific books from libraries be-

cause they are unwilling to have their names entered as having taken out such

and such a book for fear the agents of other firms should be able to trace the kind

of research they are likely to be undertaking.

nce4_19.txt

A gentleman is, rather than does. He is interested in nothing in a professional

way. He is allowed to cultivate hobbies, even eccentricities, but must not prac-

tise a vocation. He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly. He should

have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplo-

matic service. But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule

us today. He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how

foreign countries are governed. He does not respect learning and prefers 'sport '.

The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy

for its function, and here grave difficulties arise. He refuses to consider suf-

ficiently the wants of the customer, who must buy, not the thing he desires but

the thing the English gentleman wants to sell. He attends inadequately to techno-

logical development. Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in

the modern world, he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy, both in finance

and method of production. He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in

appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called

'character,' which means, in a gentleman's mouth, the qualities he traditionally

possesses himself. His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyal-

ties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm. He is

incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to

which he must adjust himself and his institutions, that every privilege he formely

took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant

to social welfare.

nce4_20.txt

In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physio-

logical and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. Modern

industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost,

in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as

possible. It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings

who run the machines, and without giving any consideration to the effects pro-

duced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of exist-

ence imposed by the factory. The great cities have been built with no regard for

us. The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend entirely on the neces-

sity of obtaining the maximum income per square foot of ground, and of offering

to the tenants offices and apartments that please them. This caused the construc-

tion of gigantic buildings where too large masses of human beings are crowded

together. Civilized men like such a way of living. While they enjoy the comfort

and banal luxury of their dwelling,they do not realize that they are deprived of

the necessities of life. The modern city consists of monstrous edifices and of

dark, narrow streets full of petrol fumes,coal dust, and toxic gases, torn by the

noise of the taxi-cabs, lorries and buses, and thronged ceaselessly by great

crowds. Obviously, it has no been planned for the good of its inhabitants.

nce4_21.txt

In the early days of the settlement of Australia, enterprising settlers unwisely

introduced the European rabbit. This rabbit had no natural enemies in the An-

tipodes, so that it multiplied with that promiscuous abandon characteristic of

rabbits. It overran a whole continent. It caused devastation by burrowing and

by devouring the herbage which might have maintained millions of sheep and

cattle. Scientists discovered that this particular variety of rabbit (and apparently

no other animal) was susceptible to a fatal virus disease, myxomatosis. By infect-

ing animals and letting them loose in the burrows, local epidemics of this disease

could be created. Later it was found that there was a type of mosquito which

acted as the carrier of this disease and passed it on to the rabbits. So while the

rest of the world was trying to get rid of mosquitoes, Australia was encouraging

this one. It effectively spread the disease all over the continent and drastically

reduced the rabbit population. lt later became apparent that rabbits were de-

veloping a degree of resistance to this disease, so that the rabbit population was

unlikely to be completely exterminated. There were hopes, however, that the

problem of the rabbit would become manageable.

Ironically, Europe, which had bequeathed the rabbit as a pest to Australia

acquired this man-made disease as a pestilence. A French physician decided to

get rid of the wild rabbits on his own estate and introduced myxomatosis. It did

not, however, remain within the confines of his estate. It spread through France

where wild rabbits are not generally regarded as a pest but as a sport and a useful

food supply, and it spread to Britain where wild rabbits are regarded as a pest

but where domesticated rabbits, equally susceptible to the disease, are the basis

of a profitable fur industry. The question became one of whether Man could con-

trol the disease he had invented.

nce4_22.txt

There has long been a superstition among mariners that porpoises will save

drowning men by pushing them to the surface, or protect them from sharks by

surrounding them in defensive formation. Marine Studio biologists have pointed

out that, however intelligent they may be, it is probably a mistake to credit dol-

phins with any motive of life-saving. On the occasions when they have pushed to

shore an unconscious human being they have much more likely done it out of

curiosity or for sport,as in riding the bow waves of a ship. In 1928 some porpoises

were photographed working like beavers to push ashore a waterlogged mattress.

If, as has been reported, they have protected humans from sharks, it may have

been because curiosity attracted them and because the scent of a possible meal

attracted the sharks. Porpoises and sharks are natural enemies. It is possible

that upon such an occasion a battle ensued, with the sharks being driven away

or killed.

Whether it be bird, fish or beast, the porpoise is intrigued with anything that

is alive. They are constantly after the turtles, the Ferdinands of marine life, who

peacefully submit to all sorts of indignities. One young calf especially enjoyed

raising a turtle to the surface with his snout and then shoving him across the

tank like an aquaplane. Almost any day a young porpoise may be seen trying

to turn a 300-pound sea turtle over by sticking his snout under the edge of his

shell and pushing up for dear life. This is not easy, and may require two porpoises

working together. In another game, as the turtle swims across the oceanarium,

the first porpoise swoops down from above and butts his shell with his belly.

This knocks the turtle down several feet. He no sooner recovers his equilibrium

than the next porpoise comes along and hits him another crack. Eventually the

turtle has been butted all the way down to the floor of the tank. He is now satis-

fied merely to try to stand up, but as soon as he does so a porpoise knocks him

flat. The turtle at last gives up by pulling his feet under his shell and the game

is over.

nce4_23.txt

It is fairly clear that the sleeping period must have some function, and because

there is so much of it the function would seem to be important. Speculations

about its nature have been going on for literally thousands of years, and one odd

finding that makes the problem puzzling is that it looks very much as if sleeping

is not simply a matter of giving the body a rest.' Rest ', in terms of muscle relaxa-

tion and so on, can be achieved by a brief period lying, or even sitting down. The

body's tissues are self-repairing and self-restoring to a degree, and function best

when more or less continuously active. In fact a basic amount of movement occurs

during sleep which is specifically concerned with preventing muscle inactivity.

If it is not a question of resting the body, then perhaps it is the brain that needs

resting? This might be a plausible hypothesis were it not for two factors. First the

electroencephalograph (which is simply a device for recording the electrical

activity of the brain by attaching electrodes to the scalp) shows that while there

is a change in the pattern of activity during sleep, there is no evidence that the

total amount of activity is any less. The second factor is more interesting and

more fundamental. In l960 an American psychiatrist named William Dement

published experiments dealing with the recording of eye-movements during

sleep. He showed that the average individual's sleep cycle is punctuated with

peculiar bursts of eye-movements, some drifting and slow, others jerky and rapid.

People woken during these periods of eye-movements generally reported that

they had been dreaming. When woken at other times they reported no dreams. If

one group of people were disturbed from their eye-movement sleep for several

nights on end, and another group were disturbed for an equal period of time but

when they were not exhibiting eye-movements, the first group began to show

some personality disorders while the others seemed more or less unaffected. The

implications of all this were that it was not the disturbance of sleep that mattered,

but the disturbance of dreaming.

nce4_24.txt

Walking for walking's sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a thing as

it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to it is that it stops the

brain. Many a man has professed to me that his brain never works so well as

when he is swinging along the high road or over hill and dale This boast is not

confirmed by my memory of anybody who on a Sunday morning has forced me

to partake of his adventure. Experience teaches me that whatever a fellow-guest

may have of power to instruct or to amuse when he is sitting in a chair, or stand-

ing on a hearth-rug, quickly leaves him when he takes one out for a walk. The

ideas that come so thick and fast to him in any room, where are they now ? where

that encyclopaedic knowledge which he bore so lightly ? where the kindling fancy

that played like summer lightning over any topic that was started ? The man's

face that was so mobile is set now; gone is the light from his fine eyes. He says

that A (our host) is a thoroughly good fellow. Fifty yards further on, he adds

that A is one of the best fellows he has ever met. We tramp another furlong or so

and he says that Mrs A is a charming woman. Presently he adds that she is one

of the most charming women he has ever known. We pass an inn. He reads

vapidly aloud to me:'The King's Arms. Licensed to sell Ales and Spirits.' I

foresee that during the rest of the walk he will read aloud any inscription that

occurs. We pass a milestone. He points at it with his stick, and says' Uxminster.

II Miles.' We turn a sharp corner at the foot of the hill. He points at the wall,

and says' Drive Slowly.' .I see far ahead, on the other side of the hedge bordering

the high road, a small notice-board. He sees it too. He keeps his eye on it. And

in due course.'Trespassers,' he says, 'will be Prosecuted.' Poor man !--mentally

a wreck.

nce4_25.txt

How it came about that snakes manufactured poison is a mystery. Over the

periods their saliva, a mild, digestive juice like our own, was converted into a

poison that defies analysis even today. It was not forced upon them by the sur-

vival competition; they could have caught and lived on prey without using

poison just as the thousands of non-poisonous snakes still do. Poison to a snake

is merely a luxury; it enables it to get its food with very little effort, no more

effort than one bite. And why only snakes ? Cats, for instance, would be greatly

helped; no running rights with large, fierce rats or tussles with grown rabbits-

just a bite and no more effort needed. In fact it would be an assistance to all the

carnivorae--though it would be a two-edged weapon -When they fought each

other. But, of the vertebrates, unpredictable Nature selected only snakes (and

one lizard). One wonders also why Nature, with some snakes concocted poison

of such extreme potency.

In the conversion of saliva into poison one might suppose that a fixed process

took place. It did not; some snakes manufactured a poison different in every re-

spect from that of others, as different as arsenic is from strychnine, and having

different effects. One poison acts on the nerves, the other on the blood.

The makers of the nerve poison include the mambas and the cobras and their

venom is called neurotoxic. Vipers (adders) and rattlesnakes manufacture the

blood poison, which is known as haemolytic. Both poisons are unpleasant, but

by far the more unpleasant is the blood poison. It is said that the nerve poison

is the more primitive of the two, that the blood poison is , so to speak, a newer

product from an improved formula. Be that as it may, the nerve poison does its

business with man far more quickly than the blood poison. This,however,means

nothing. Snakes did not acquire their poison for use against man but for use

against prey such as rats and mice, and the effects on these of viperine poison is

almost immediate.

nce4_26.txt

William S. Hart was, perhaps, the greatest of all Western stars, for unlike Gary

Cooper and John Wayne he appeared in nothing but Westerns. From 1914 to

1924 he was supreme and unchallenged. It was Hart who created the basic

formula of the Western film, and devised the protagonist he played in every film

he made, the good-bad man, the accidental, noble outlaw, or the honest but

framed cowboy, or the sheriff made suspect by vicious gossip; in short, the indi-

vidual in conflict with himself and his frontier environment.

Unlike most of his contemporaries in Hollywood, Hart actually 'knew some-

thing of the old West. He had lived in it as a child when it was already disappear-

ing, and his hero was firmly rooted in his memories and experiences, and in both

the history and the mythology of the vanished frontier. And although no period

or place in American history has been more absurdly romanticized, myth and

reality did join hands in at least one arena, the conflict between the individual

and encroaching civilization.

Men accustomed to struggling for survival against the elements and Indian

were bewildered by politicians, bankers and business-men, and unhorsed by

fences, laws and alien taboos. Hart's good-bad man was always an outsider,

always one of the disinherited, and if he found it necessary to shoot a sheriff or

rob a bank along the way, his early audiences found it easy to understand and

forgive, especially when it was Hart who, in the end, overcame the attacking

Indians.

Audiences in the second decade of the twentieth century found it pleasant to

escape to a time when life, though hard, was relatively simple. We still do; living

in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, chicanery, anarchy

and impending immolation are part of our daily lives, we all want a code to

live by.

nce4_27.txt

Why does the idea of progress loom so large in the modern world ? Surely be-

cause progress of a particular kind is actually taking place around us and is

becoming more and more manifest. Although mankind has undergone no general

improvement in intelligence or morality, it has made extraordinary progress

the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge began to increase as soon as the

thoughts of one individual could be communicated to another by means of

speech. With the invention of writing, a great advance was made, for knowledge

could then be not only communicated but also stored. Libraries made education

possible, and education in its turn added to libraries: the growth of knowledge

followed a kind of compound-interest law, which was greatly enhanced by the

invention of printing. All this was comparatively slow until, with the coming

science, the tempo was suddenly raised. Then knowledge began to be accumu-

lated according to a systematic plan. The trickle became a stream; the stream

has now become a torrent. Moreover, as soon as new knowledge is acquired, it

is now turned to practical account. What is called 'modern civilization' is not

the result of a balanced development of all man's nature, but of accumulated

knowledge applied to practical life. The problem now facing humanity is: What

is going to be done with all this knowledge ? As is so often pointed out, knowledge

is a two-edged weapon which can be used equally for good or evil. It is now being

used indifferently for both. Could any spectacle, for instance, be more grimly

whimsical than that of gunners using science to shatter men's bodies while, close

at hand, surgeons use it to restore them ? We have to ask ourselves very seriously

what will happen if this twofold use of knowledge, with its ever-increasing

power, continues.

nce4_28.txt

No two sorts of birds practise quite the same sort of flight; the varieties are infi-

nite, but two classes may be roughly seen. Any ship that crosses the pacific is

accompanied for many days by the smaller albatross, which may keep company

with the vessel for an hour without visible or more than occasional movement of

wing. The currents of air that the walls of the ship direct upwards, as well as in

the line of its course are enough to give the great bird with its immense wings

sufficient sustenance and progress. The albatross is the king of the gliders, the

class of fliers which harness the air to their purpose, but must yield to its opposi-

tion. In the contrary school the duck is supreme. It comes nearer to the engines

with which man has 'conquered' the air, as he boasts. Duck, and like them the

pigeons, are endowed with steel-like muscles, that are a good part of the weight

of the bird, and these will ply the short wings with irresistible power that they

can bore for long distances through an opposite gale before exhaustion follows.

Their humbler followers, such as partridges, have a like power of strong propul-

sion, but soon tire. You may pick them up in utter exhaustion, if wind over the

sea has driven them to a long journey. The swallow shares the virtues of both

schools in highest measure. It tires not nor does it boast of its power; but belongs

to the air, travelling it may be six thousand miles to and from its northern nesting

home feeding its flown young as it flies and slipping through a medium that

seems to help its passage even when the wind is adverse. Such birds do us good,

though we no longer take omens from their flight on this side and that, and even

the most superstitious villagers no longer take off their hats to the magpie and

wish it good-morning.

nce4_29.txt

A young man sees a sunset and, unable to understand or to express the emotion

that it rouses in him, concludes that it must be the gateway to a world that lies

beyond. It is difficult for any of us in moments of intense aesthetic experience to

resist the suggestion that we are catching a glimpse of a light that shines down

to us from a different realm of existence, different and, because the experience is

intensely moving, in some way higher. And, though the gleams blind and dazzle,

yet do they convey a hint of beauty and serenity greater than we have known or

imagined. Greater too than we can describe, for language, which was invented

to convey the meanings of this world, cannot readily be fitted to the uses of

another.

That all great art has this power of suggesting a world beyond is undeniable.

In some moods Nature shares it. There is no sky in June so blue that it does not

point forward to a bluer, no sunset so beautiful that it does not waken the vision

of a greater beauty, a vision which passes before it is fully glimpsed, and in

passing leaves an indefinable longing and regret. But, if this world is not merely

a bad joke, life a vulgar flare amid the cool radiance of the stars, and existence

an empty laugh braying across the mysteries; if these intimations of a something

behind and beyond are not evil humour born of indigestion, or whimsies sent by

the devil to mock and madden us, if, in a word, beauty means something, yet we

must not seek to interpret the meaning. If we glimpse the unutterable, it is un-

wise to try to utter it, nor should we seek to invest with significance that which

we cannot grasp. Beauty in terms of our human meanings is meaningless.

nce4_30.txt

Each civilization is born, it culminates, and it decays. There is a widespread

testimony that this ominous fact is due to inherent biological defects in the

crowded life of cities. Now, slowly and at first faintly, an opposite tendency is

showing itself. Better roads and better vehicles at first induced the wealthier

classes to live on the outskirts of the cities. The urgent need for defence had also

vanished. This tendency is now spreading rapidly downwards. But a new set of

conditions is just showing itself. Up to the present time, throughout the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, this new tendency placed the home in the immediate

suburbs, but concentrated manufacturing activity, business relations, govern-

ment, and pleasure in the centres of the cities. Apart from the care of children

and periods of sheer rest, the active lives were spent in the cities. In some ways

the concentration of such activities was even more emphasized, and the homes

were pushed outwards even at the cost of the discomfort of commuting. But, if

we examine the trend of technology during the past generation, the reasons for

this concentration are largely disappearing. Still more, the reasons for the choice

of sites for cities are also altering. Mechanical power can be transmitted for

hundreds of miles, men can communicate almost instantaneously by telephone,

the chiefs of great organizations can be transported by airplanes, the cinemas can

produce plays in every village, music, speeches, and sermons can be broadcast.

Almost every reason for the growth of the cities,concurrently with the growth of

civilization has been profoundly modified.

nce4_31.txt

Many people in industry and the Services, who have practical experience of

noise, regard any investigation of this question as a waste of time; they are not

prepared even to admit the possibility that noise affects people. On the other

hand, those who dislike noise will sometimes use most inadequate evidence to

support their pleas for a quieter society. This is a pity, because noise abatement

really is a good cause. and it is likely to be discredited if it gets to be associated

with bad science.

One allegation often made is that noise produces mental illness. A recent article

in a weekly newspaper, for instance, was headed with a striking illustration of a

lady in a state of considerable distress, with the caption 'She was yet another

victim, reduced to a screaming wreck '. On turning eagerly to the text, one learns

that the lady was a typist who found the sound of office typewriters worried her

more and more until eventually she had to go into a mental hospital. Now the

snag in this sort of anecdote is of course that one cannot distinguish cause and

effect. Was the noise a cause of the illness, or were the complaints about noise

merely a symptom? Another patient might equally well complain that her neigh-

bours were combining to slander her and persecute her, and yet one might be

cautious about believing this statement.

What is needed in the case of noise is a study of large numbers of people living

under noisy conditions, to discover whether they are mentally ill more often than

other people are. The United States Navy, for instance, recently examined a very

large number of men working on aircraft carriers: the study was known as

Project Anehin. It can be unpleasant to live even several miles from an aerodrome;

if you think what it must be like to share the deck of a ship with several squad-

rons of jet aircraft, you will realize that a modern navy is a good place to study

noise. But neither psychiatric interviews nor objective tests were able to show

any effects upon these American sailors. This result merely confirms earlier

American and British studies: if there is any effect of noise upon mental health

it must be so small that present methods of psychiatric diagnosis cannot find it.

That does not prove that it does not exist; but it does mean that noise is less

dangerous than, say, being brought up in an orphanages--which really is a mental

health hazard.

nce4_32.txt

It is animals and plants which lived in or near water whose remains are most

likely to be preserved, for one of the necessary conditions of preservation is quick

burial, and it is only in the seas and rivers, and sometimes lakes, where mud and

silt have been continuously deposited, that bodies and the like can be rapidly

covered over and preserved.

But even in the most favourable circumstances only a small fraction of the

creatures that die are preserved in this way before decay sets in or, even more

likely, before scavengers eat them. After all, all living creatures live by feeding

on something else, whether it be plant or animal, dead or alive, and it is only by

chance that such a fate is avoided. The remains of plants and animals that lived

on land are much more rarely preserved, for there is seldom anything to cover

them over. When you think of the innumerable birds that one sees flying about,

not to mention the equally numerous small animals like field mice and voles

which you do not see, it is very rarely that one comes across a dead body, except,

of course, on the roads. They decompose and are quickly destroyed by the

weather or eaten by some other creature.

It is almost always due to some very special circumstances that traces of land

animals survive, as by falling into inaccessible caves, or into an ice crevasse, like

the Siberian mammoths, when the whole animal is sometimes preserved, as in

a refrigerator. This is what happened to the famous Beresovka mammoth which

was found preserved and in good condition. In his mouth were the remains of

fir trees--the last meal that he had before he fell into the crevasse and broke his

back. The mammoth has now been restored in the Palaeontological Museum in

Leningrad. Other animals were trapped in tar pits, like the elephants, sabre-

toothed cats, and numerous other creatures that are found at Rancho la Brea,

which is now just a suburb of Los Angeles. Apparently what happened was that

water collected on these tar pits, and the bigger animals like the elephants ven-

tured out on to the apparently firm surface to drink, and were promptly bogged

in the tar. And then, when they were dead, the carnivores, like the sabre-toothed

cats and the giant wolves, came out to feed and suffered exactly the same fate.

There are also endless numbers of birds in the tar as well.

nce4_33.txt

From the seventeenth-century empire of Sweden, the story of a galleon that

sank at the start of her maiden voyage in 1628 must be one of the strangest tales

of the sea. For nearly three and a half centuries she lay at the bottom of Stock-

holm harbour until her discovery in 1956. This was the Vasa, royal flagship of

the great imperial fleet.

King Gustavus Adolphus, 'The Northern Hurricane', then at the height of

his military success in the Thirty Years' War, had dictated her measurements

and armament. Triple gun-decks mounted sixty-four bronze cannon. She was

intended to play a leading role in the growing might of Sweden.

As she was prepared for her maiden voyage on August 10, 1628, Stockholm

was in a ferment. From the Skeppsbron and surrounding islands the people

watched this thing of beauty begin to spread her sails and catch the wind. They

had laboured for three years to produce this floating work of art; she was more

richly carved and ornamented than any previous ship. The high stern castle was

a riot of carved gods, demons, knights, kings, warriors,mermaids, cherubs; and

zoomorphic animal shapes ablaze with red and gold and blue, symbols of courage,

power, and cruelty, were portrayed to stir the imaginations of the superstitious

sailors of the day.

Then the cannons of the anchored warships thundered a salute to which the

Vasa fired in reply. As she emerged from her drifting cloud of gun smoke with

the water churned to foam beneath her bow, her flags flying, pennants waving,

sails filling in the breeze, and the red and gold of her superstructure ablaze with

colour, she presented a more majestic spectacle than Stockholmers had ever seen

before. All gun-ports were open and the muzzles peeped wickedly from them.

As the wind freshened there came a sudden squall and the ship made a strange

movement, listing to port. The Ordnance Officer ordered all the port cannon to

be heaved to starboard to counteract the list, but the steepening angle of the decks

increased. Then the sound of rumbling thunder reached the watchers on the

shore, as cargo, ballast, ammunition and 400 people went sliding and crashing

down to the port side of the steeply listing ship. The lower gun-ports were now

below water and the inrush sealed the ship's fate. In that first glorious hour, the

mighty Vasa, which was intended to rule the Baltic, sank with all flags flying--in

the harbour of her birth.

nce4_34.txt

This is a sceptical age, but although our faith in many of the things in which our

forefathers fervently believed has weakened, our confidence in the curative

properties of the bottle of medicine remains the same as theirs. This modern

faith in medicines is roved by the fact that the annual drug bill of the Health

Services is mounting to astronomical figures and shows no signs at present of

ceasing to rise. The majority of the patients attending the medical out-patients

departments of our hospitals feel that they have not received adequate treatment

unless they are able to carry home with them some tangible remedy in the shape

of a bottle of medicine, a box of pills, or a small jar of ointment, and the doctor

in charge of the department is only too ready to provide them with these require-

ments. There is no quicker method of disposing of patients than by giving them

what they are asking for, and since most medical men in the Health Services are

overworked and have little time for offering time-consuming and little-appre-

ciated advice on such subjects as diet, right living, and the need for abandoning

bad habits, etc., the bottle, the box, and the jar are almost always granted them.

Nor is it only the ignorant and ill-educated person who has such faith in the

bottle of medicine, especially if it be wrapped in white paper and sealed with a

dab of red sealing-wax by a clever chemist. It is recounted of Thomas Carlyle

that when he heard of the illness of his friend, Henry Taylor, he went off

immediately to visit him, carrying with him in his pocket what remained of a

bottle of medicine formerly prescribed for an indisposition of Mrs Carlyle's.

Carlyle was entirely ignorant of what the bottle in his pocket contained, of the

nature of the illness from which his friend was suffering, and of what had pre-

viously been wrong with his wife, but a medicine that had worked so well in one

form of illness would surely be of equal benefit in another, and comforted by

the thought of the help he was bringing to his friend, he hastened to Henry

Taylor's house. History does not relate whether his friend accepted his medical

help, but in all probability he did. The great advantage of taking medicine is that

it makes no demands on the taker beyond that of putting up for a moment with a

disgusting taste, and that is what all patients demand of their doctors-- to be

cured at no inconvenience to themselves.

nce4_35.txt

Many strange new means of transport have been developed in our century, the

strangest of them being perhaps the hovercraft. In 1953, a former electronics

engineer in his fifties, Christopher Cockerell, who had turned to boat-building

on the Norfolk Broads, suggested an idea on which he had been working for

many years to the British Government and industrial circles. It was the idea of

supporting a craft on a' pad ', or cushion, of low-pressure air, ringed with a cur-

tain of higher pressure air. Ever since, people have had difficulty in deciding

whether the craft should be ranged among ships, planes, or land vehicles--for it

is something in between a boat and an aircraft. As a shipbuilder, Cockerell was

trying to find a solution to the problem of the wave resistance which wastes a good

deal of a surface ship's power and limits its speed. His answer was to lift the

vessel out of the water by making it ride on a cushion of air, no more than one or

two feet thick. This is done by a great number of ring-shaped air jets on the

bottom of the craft. It 'flies', therefore, but it cannot fly higher--its action de-

pends on the surface, water or ground, over which it rides.

The first tests on the Solent in 1959 caused a sensation. The hovercraft

travelled first over the water, then mounted the beach, climbed up the dunes,

and sat down on a road. Later it crossed the Channel, riding smoothly over the

waves, which presented no problem.

Since that time, various types of hovercraft have appeared and taken up regular

service--cruises on the Thames in London, for instance, have become an annual

attraction. But we are only at the beginning of a development that may transport net-

sea and land transport. Christopher Cockerell's craft can establish transport

works in large areas with poor communications such as Africa or Australia; it

can become a 'flying fruit-bowl', carrying bananas from the plantations to the

ports, giant hovercraft liners could span the Atlantic; and the railway of the

future may well be the 'hovertrain', riding on its air cushion over a single rail,

which it never touches, at speeds up to 300 m.p.h.--the possibilities appear

unlimited.

nce4_36.txt

Our knowledge of the oceans a hundred years ago was confined to the two-dimen-

sional shape of the sea-surface and the hazards of navigation presented by the

irregularities in depth of the shallow water close to the land. The open sea was

deep and mysterious,and anyone who gave more than a passing thought to the

bottom confines of the oceans probably assumed that the sea-bed was flat. Sir

James Clark Ross had obtained a sounding of over 2,400 fathoms in 1836 but

it was not until 1800, when H.M.S. Porcupine was put at the disposal of the

Royal Society for several cruises, that a series of deep soundings was obtained

in the Atlantic and the first samples were collected by dredging the bottom.

Shortly after this the famous H.M.S. Challenger expedition established the study

of the sea-floor as a subject worthy of the most qualified physicists and geologists.

A burst of activity associated with the laying of submarine cables soon confirmed

the Challenger's observation that many parts of the ocean were two to three miles

deep, and the existence of underwater features of considerable magnitude.

Today enough soundings are available to enable a relief map of the Atlantic to

be drawn and we know something of the great variety of the sea-bed's topo-

graphy. Since the sea covers the greater part of the earth's surface it is quite

reasonable to regard the sea-floor as the basic form of the crust of the earth, with

superimposed upon it the continents, together with the islands and other features

of the oceans. The continents form rugged tablelands which stand nearly three

miles above the floor of the open ocean. From the shore-line out to a distance

which may be anywhere from a few miles to a few hundred miles runs the gentle

slope of the continental shelf, geologically part of the continents. The real

dividing-line between continents and oceans occurs at the foot of a steeper slope.

This continental slope usually starts at a place somewhere near the ice-fathom

mark and in the course of a few hundred miles reaches the true ocean-floor at

2,500-3,000 fathoms. The slope averages about 1 in 30, but contains steep,

probably vertical, cliffs, and gentle sediment-covered terraces, and near its lower

reaches there is a long tailing-off which is almost certainly the result of material

transported out to deep water after being eroded from the continental masses.

nce4_37.txt

The Victorians, realizing that the greatest happiness accorded to man is that

provided by a happy marriage, endeavoured to pretend that all their marriages

were happy. We, for our part, admitting the fact that no feat of intelligence and

character is so exacting as that required of two people who desire to live per-

manently together on a basis of amity, are obsessed by the problem of how to

render the basic facts of cohabitation simpler and more reasonable, in order that

unhappy marriages may less frequently result. The Victorians would have con-

sidered it 'painful' or 'unpleasant' were one to point out that only four marriages

out of every ten are anything but forced servitudes. We ourselves start from this

very assumption and try to build from it a theory of more sensible relations be-

tween the sexes. Of all forms of arrant untruthfulness Victorian optimism ap-

pears to me to have been the most cowardly and the most damaging.

Truth, therefore, is an attitude of the mind. lt is important, if one does not

wish to inconvenience and to bore one's friends, not to tell lies. But it is more

important not to think lies, or to slide into those mechanical and untruthful

habits of thought which are so pleasant and so easy as descents to mental inepti-

tude. The victorian habit of mind (which I consider to have been a bad habit of

mind) was unduly preoccupied by what was socially and morally convenient.

Convenience is, however, in all affairs of life, an execrable test of value. One

should have the courage to think uncomfortably, since it is only by rejecting the

convenient that one can come to think the truth.

Not, after all, that there is any such thing as truth. At best we can approach

to some relative approximation. On the other hand, there is surely such a thing

as untruth. One is generally aware when one has said something, or acted in some

way which has left on other people an impression not strictly in accordance with

the facts. One is generally aware, also. when one has thrust aside an inconvenient

thought and slid into its place another thought which is convenient. One's

awareness in the former case is in general more acute than in the latter, since we

are more on the look-out for the lies we utter than for those we merely think. In

fact, however, it is the untruthful thought which is the more vicious of the two.

Spoken lies are invariably tiresome and may actually be dishonest. But con-

tinuous lying in the mind, a disease to which the Anglo-Saxon is peculiarly ex-

posed, spells the destruction of human thought and character.

nce4_38.txt

Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the abi8lity to respond to form in three

dimensions. That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most

difficult of all arts; certainly it is more difficult than the arts which involve ap-

preciation of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. Many more people are

'form-blind' than colour-blind. The child learning to see, first distinguishes only

two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances,depths. Later, for its personal

safety and practical needs, it has to develop(partly by means of touch) the ability

to judge roughly three-dimensional distances. But having satisfied the require-

ments of practical necessity, most people go no further. Though they may attain

considerable accuracy in the perception of flat form, they do not make the further

intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial

existence.

this is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of , and

use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, in-

side his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely

enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from

all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like;

he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes

its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air.

And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as

shape, not as description or reminiscence. He must, for example, perceive an

egg as a simple single solid shape, quite apart from its significance as food,or

from the literary idea that it will become a bird. And so with solids such as a

shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, a mountain peak, a kidney, a

carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a bulrush, a bone. From

these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms of combinations of several

forms.

nce4_39.txt

In his own lifetime Galileo was the centre of violent controversy; but the scien-

tific dust has long since settled, and today we can see even his famous clash with

the Inquisition in something like its proper perspective. But, in contrast, it is only

in modern times that Galileo has become a problem child for historians of

science.

The old view of Galileo was delightfully uncomplicated. He was, above all, a

man who experimented: who despised the prejudices and book learning of the

Aristotelians, who put his questions to nature instead of to the ancients, and who

drew his conclusions fearlessly. He had been the first to turn a telescope to the

sky, and he had seen there evidence enough to overthrow Aristotle and Ptolemy

together. He was the man who climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped

various weights from the top, who rolled balls down inclined planes, and then

generalized the results of his many experiments into the famous law of free fall.

But a closer study of the evidence, supported by a deeper sense of the period,

and particularly by a new consciousness of the philosophical undercurrents in

the scientific revolution, has profoundly modified this view of Galileo. Today,

although the old Galileo lives on in many popular writings, among historians of

science a new and more sophisticated picture has emerged. At the same time our

sympathy for Balileo's opponents has grown somewhat. His telescopic observa-

tion are justly immortal; they aroused great interest at the time, they had im-

portant theoretical consequences, and they provided a striking demonstration of

the potentialities hidden in instruments and apparatus. But can we blame those

who looked and failed to see what Galileo saw, if we remember that to use a

telescope at the limit of its powers calls for long experience and intimate famili-

arity with one's instrument? Was the philosopher who refused to look through

Galileo's telescope more culpable than those who alleged that the spiral nebulae

observed with Lord Rosse's great telescope in the eighteen-forties were scratches

left by the grinder? We can perhaps forgive those who said the moons of Jupiter

were produced by Galileo's spy-glass if we recall that in his day, as for centuries

before, curved glass was the popular contrivance for producing not truth but

illusion, untruth; and if a single curved glass would distort nature, how much

more would a pair of them?

nce4_40.txt

Populations increase and decrease relatively not only to one another, but also to

natural resources. In most parts of the world, the relation between population

and resources is already unfavourable and will probably become even more un-

favourable in the future. This growing poverty in the midst of growing poverty

constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to

democratic institutions and personal liberty. For overpopulation is not com-

patib1e with freedom. An unfavourable relationship between numbers and re-

sources tends to make the earning of a living almost intolerably difficult. Labour

is more abundant than goods, and the individual is compelled to work long hours

for little pay. No surplus of accumulated purchasing power stands between him

and the tyrannies of unfriendly nature or of the equally unfriendly wielders of

political and economic power. Democracy is, among other things, the ability to

say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of

being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn. And he cannot be

certain of his next meal unless he owns the means of producing enough wealth,

for his family to live on, or has been able to accumulate a surplus out of past

wages, or has a chance of moving to virgin territories, where he can make a fresh

start. In an overcrowded country, very few people own enough to make them

financially independent; very few are in a position to accumulate purchasing

power; and there is no free land. Moreover, in any country where population

presses hard upon natural resources, the general economic situation is apt to be

so precarious that government control of capital and labour, production and con-

sumption, becomes inevitable. It is no accident that the twentieth century should

be the century of highly centralized governments and totalitarian dictatorships;

it had to be so for the simple reason that the twentieth century is the century of

planetary overcrowding.

nce4_41.txt

Education is one of the key words of our time. A man without an education,

many of us believe, is an unfortunate victim of adverse circumstances deprived

of one of the greatest twentieth-century opportunities. Convinced of the im-

portance of education, modern states 'invest' in institutions of learning to get

back 'interest' in the form of a large group of enlightened young men and women

who are potential leaders. Education, with its cycles of instruction so carefully

worked out, punctuated by text-books--those purchasable wells of wisdom--

what would civilization be like without its benefits ?

So much is certain: that we would have doctors and preachers, lawyers and

defendantS, marriages and births--but our spiritual outlook would be different.

We would lay less stress on 'facts and figures' and more on a good memory, on

applied psychology, and on the capacity of a man to get along with his fellow-

citizens. If our educational system were fashioned after its bookless past we

would have the most democratic form of 'college' imaginable. Among the people

whom we like to call savages all knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by

all; it is taught to every member of the tribe so that in this respect everybody is,

equally equipped for life.

It is the ideal condition of the 'equal start' which only our most progressive

forms of modern education try to regain. In primitive cultures the obligation to

seek and to receive the traditional instruction is binding to all. There are no

'illiterates '--if the term can be applied to peoples without a script--while our

own compulsory school attendance became law in Germany in 1642, in France

in 1806, and in England in 1876, and is still non-existent in a number of 'civi-

lized' nations. This shows how long it was before we deemed it necessary to

make sure that all our children could share in the knowledge accumulated by the

'happy few' during the past centuries.

Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means. All are entitled

to an equal start. There is none of the hurry which, in our society, often hampers

the full development of a growing personality. There, a child grows up under

the ever-present attention of his parents, therefore the jungles and the savannahs

know of no 'juvenile delinquency.' No necessity of making a living away from

home results in neglect of children, and no father is confronted with his inability

to 'buy' an education for his child.

nce4_42.txt

Parents are often upset when their children praise the homes of their friends and

regard it as a slur on their own cooking, or cleaning, or furniture, and often are

foolish enough to let the adolescents see that they are annoyed. They may even

accuse them of disloyalty, or make some spiteful remark about the friends'

parents. Such a loss of dignity and descent into childish behaviour on the part of

the adults deeply shocks the adolescents, and makes them resolve that in future

they will not talk to their parents about the places or people they visit. Before

very long the parents will be complaining that the child is so secretive and never

tells them anything, but they seldom realize that they have brought this on

themselves.

Disillusionment with the parents, however good and adequate they may be

both as parents and as individuals, is to some degree inevitable. Most children

have such a high ideal of their parents, unless the parents themselves have been

unsatisfactory, that it ca hardly hope to stand up to a realistic evaluation. Parents

would be greatly surprised and deeply touched if they realize how much belief

their children usually have in their character and infallibility, and how much this

faith means to a child. If parents were prepared for this adolescent reaction, and

realized that it was a sign that the child was growing up and developing valuable

powers of observation and independent judgement, they would not be so hurt,

and therefore would not drive the child into opposition by resenting and resist-

ing it.

The adolescent, with his passion for sincerity,always respects a parent who

admits that he is wrong, or ignorant, or even that he has been unfair or unjust.

What the child cannot forgive is the parents' refusal to admit these charges if the

child knows them to be true.

Victorian parents believed that they kept their dignity by retreating behind an

unreasoning authoritarian attitude; in fact hey did nothing of the kind, but

children were then too cowed to let them know how they really felt. Today we

tend to go to the other extreme, but on the whole this is a healthier attitude both

for the child and the parent. It is always wiser and safer to face up to reality,

however painful it may be at the moment.

nce4_43.txt

Faith in controlled nuclear fission is now being shown by the construction of

atomic power stations. In Britain, Calder Hall on the coast of Cumberland first

made its contribution to the National Electricity grid in 1957. Subsequently a

chain of nuclear power stations was planned. Of necessity they are sited near the

coasts or tidal water because of the need of much water for cooling and a certain

discharge of possible radioactive effluent. Atomic power is associated in the

public mind with the destructive force of atom bombs and partly for this reason,

though it is claimed that there is no danger to be associated with atomic power

stations, they are being sited away from populous centres.

The present position is that the three main sources of power are coal, oil and

water power. We sometimes refer to electricity ,gas or petrol as if they were the

actual source of power , forgetting that electricity must be generated by the

consumption of coal or oil or by the utilization of water power, whilst coke,gas

and petrol are examples of secondary fuels by which coal and oil may be more

effectively used.

Where alternative sources of power are available there are some marked con-

trasts in handling. The bulk and weight of coal required in the majority of

manufacturing industries is large in comparison with the bulk and weight of

other raw materials. This is not always true--was with the manufacture of pig

iron and steel from low-grade iron ores-- but it did lead to the concentration of

industrial developments on the coal-fields, a phenomenon well seen in such

countries as Britain where the Industrial Revolution came before the days of oil

or electricity. Coal being a solid must be distributed mainly by rail or water.

By way of contrast oil can be transported large distances by pipeline but over-

seas movement has involved building of large numbers of tankers, including now

some of the largest vessels afloat. Unless suitable on other grounds oilfields have

not become industrial regions; on the contrary the oil industry is marked by a

certain amount of smell and an element of danger, hence the siting of refineries

at a distance from population centres. It is not always realized that the owners of

pipelines can handle the oil of different customers, sending it through at dif-

ferent, periods. Natural gas can also be transported large distances by pipe. Early

in 1959 Britain received the first ship cargo of natural gas----liquefied for the

purpose of transport.

nce4_44.txt

If a nation is essentially disunited, it is left to the government to hold it together.

This increases the expense of government, and reduces correspondingly the

amount of economic resources that could be used for developing the country,

And it should not be forgotten how small those resources are in a poor and back-

ward country. Where the cost of government is high, resources for development

are correspondingly low.

This may be illustrated by comparing the position of a nation with that of a

private business enterprise. An enterprise has to incur certain costs and expenses

in order to stay in business. For our purposes, we are concerned only with one

kind of cost--the cost of managing and administering the business. Such adminis-

trative overhead in a business is analogous to the cost of government in a nation.

The administrative overhead of a business is low to the extent that everyone

working in the business can, be trusted to behave in a way that best promotes the

interests of the firm. If they can each be trusted to take such responsibilities,

and to exercise such initiative as falls within their sphere, then administrative

overhead will be low. It will be low because it will be necessary to have only one

man looking after each job, without having another man to check upon what he

is doing, keep him in line, and report on him to someone else. But if no one can

be trusted to act in a loyal and responsible manner towards his job, then the

business will require armies of administrators, checkers, and foremen, and ad-

ministrative overhead will rise correspondingly. As administrative overhead rises,

so the earnings of the business, after meeting the expense of administration, will

fall; and the business will have less money to distribute as dividends or invest

directly in its future progress and development.

It is precisely the same with a nation. To the extent that the people can be

relied upon to behave in a loyal and responsible manner, the government does

not require armies of police and civil servants to keep them in order. But if a

nation is disunited, the government cannot be sure that the actions of the people

will be in the interests of the nation; and it will have to watch, check, and control

the people accordingly. A disunited nation therefore has to incur unduly high

costs of government.

nce4_45.txt

At the age of twelve years, the human body is at its most vigorous. It has yet to

reach its full size and strength, and its owner his or her full intelligence; but at

this age the likelihood of death is least. Earlier we were infants and young child-

ren, and consequently more vulnerable; later, we shall undergo a progressive loss

of our vigour and resistance which, though imperceptible at first, will finally be-

come so steep that we can live no longer, however well we look after ourselves,

and however well society, and our doctors, look after us. This decline in vigour

with the passing of time is called ageing. It is one of the most unpleasant dis-

coveries which we all make that we must decline in this way, that if we escape

wars, accidents and diseases we shall eventually die of old age, and that this

happens at a rate which differs little from person to person, so that there are

heavy odds in favour of our dying between the ages of sixty-five and eighty. Some

of us will die sooner, a few will live longer-- on into a ninth or tenth decade. But

the chances are against it, and there is a virtual limit on how long we can hope

to remain alive, however lucky and robust we are.

Normal people tend to forget this process unless and until they are reminded

of it. We are so familiar with the fact that man ages, that people have for years

assumed that the process of losing vigour with time, of becoming more likely to

die the older we get, was something self-evident, like the cooling of a hot kettle

or the wearing-out of a pair of shoes. They have also assumed that all animals,

and probably other organisms such as trees, or even the universe itself, must in

the nature of things 'wear out'. Most animals we commonly observe do in fact

age as we do if given the chance to live long enough; and mechanical systems like

a wound watch or the sun, do in fact run out of energy in accordance with the

second law of thermodynamics (whether the whole universe does so is a moot

point at present). But these are not analogous to what happens when man ages

A run-down watch is still a watch and can be rewound. An old watch, by con-

trast, becomes so worn and unreliable that it eventually is not worth mending

But a watch could never repair itself it does not consist of living parts, only of

metal, which wears away by friction. We could,at one time, repair ourselves

well enough, at least, to overcome all but the most instantly fatal illnesses an

accidents. Between twelve and eighty years we gradually lose this power; an

illness which at twelve would knock us over, at eighty can knock us out, and into

our grave. If we could stay as vigorous as we are at twelve, it would take about

700 years for half of us to die, and another 700 for the survivors to be reduce

by half again.

nce4_46.txt

After millennia of growth so slow that each generation hardly noticed it, the

cities are suddenly racing off in every direction. The world population goes up

by two per cent a year, city population goes up by four per cent a year, but in

big cities the rate may be as much as five and six per cent a year. To give only

one example of almost visible acceleration, Athens today grows by three dwellings

And 100 square metres of road every hour. There is no reason to believe that this

pace will slacken. As technology gradually swallows up all forms of work, indus-

trial and agricultural, the rural areas are going to shrink, just as they have shrunk

in Britain, and the vast majority of their people will move into the city. In fact,

in Britain now only about four or five per cent of people live in rural areas and

depend upon them; all through the developing world the vanguard of the rural

exodus has reached the urban fringes already, and there they huddle, migrants

in the favellas and barrios of Latin America, in shanty towns in Africa, in those

horrifying encampments one sees on the outskirts of Calcutta and Bombay. We

are heading towards an urban world.

This enormous increase will go ahead whatever we do, and we have to remem-

ber that the new cities devour space. People now acquire far more goods and

things. There is a greater density of household goods; they demand more ser-

vices such as sewage and drainage. Above all the car changes everything: rising

incomes and rising populations can make urban car density increase by some-

thing like four and five per cent in a decade; traffic flows rise to fill whatever

scale of highways are provided for them. The car also has a curious ambivalence:

it creates and then it destroys mobility. The car tempts people further out and

then gives them the appalling problem of getting back. It makes them believe

they can spend Sunday in Brighton, but makes it impossible for them to return

before, say, two in the morning. People go further and further away to reach

open air and countryside which continuously recedes from them, and just as

their working weeks decline and they begin to have more time for leisure,they

find they cannot get to the open spaces or the recreation or the beaches which

they now have the time to enjoy.

Recently some studies were made in the behaviour of mice when exposed to

more than a certain degree of density, frustration, and noise, and the mice just

became deranged. I think some sociologists wonder whether it might not be the

same for men. This combination of very high density of population, goods and

services, and machines, all increasing with almost bruta1 speed, does account for

some really antisocial tendencies in modern urban growth.

nce4_47.txt

The modern Plato, like his ancient counterpart, has an unbounded contempt for

politicians and statesmen and party leaders who are not university men. He finds

politics a dirty game, and only enters them reluctantly because he knows that at

the very least he and his friends are better than the present gang. Brought up in

the traditions of the ruling classes, he has a natural pity for the common people

whom he has learnt to know as servants, and observed from a distance at their

work in the factory, at their play in the parks and holiday resorts. He has never

mixed with them or spoken to them on equal terms, but has demanded and

generally received a respect due to his position and superior intelligence. He

knows that if they trust him, he can give them the happiness which they crave.

A man of culture, he genuinely despises the self-made industrialist and news-

paper-king: with a modest professional salary and a little private income of his

own, he regards money-making as vulgar and avoids all ostentation. Industry

and finance seem to him to be activities unworthy of gentlemen, although, alas,

many are forced by exigencies of circumstance to take some part in them.

intellectual, he gently laughs at the superstitions of most Christians, but

attends church regularly because he sees the importance of organized religion

for the maintenance of sound morality among the lower orders, and because he

dislikes the scepticism and materialism of radical teachers. His genuine passions

are for literature and the philosophy of science and he would gladly spend all his

time in studying them. But the plight of the world compels his unwilling atten-

tion, and when he sees that human stupidity and greed are about to plunge

Europe into chaos and destroy the most glorious civilization which the world has

known, he feels that it is high time for men of good sense and good will to inter-

vene and to take politics out of the hands of the plutocrats of the Right and the

woolly-minded idealists of the Left. Since he and his kind are the only represen-

tatives of decency combined with intelligence, they must step down into the

arena and save the masses for themselves.

nce4_48.txt

I have known very few writers, but those I have known, and whom I respected,

confess at once that they have little idea where they arc going when they first set

pen to paper.They have a character, perhaps two, they are in that condition of

eager discomfort which passes for inspiration, all admit radical changes of

destination once the journey has begun; one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine

months on a novel about Kashmir, then reset the whole thing in the Scottish

Highlands. I never heard of anyone making a 'skeleton', as we were taught at

school. In the breaking and remaking, in the timing, interweaving, beginning

afresh, the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not con-

sciously in his mind when he began. This organic process, often leading to

moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination. A

blurred image appears, he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone; but

something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. Sometimes the

yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written. I have heard of writers who

read nothing but their own books, like adolescents they stand before the mirror,

and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the vision before them. For the same

reason, writers talk interminably about their own books, winkling out hidden

meanings, super-imposing new ones,begging response from those around them.

Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: he might as well try to explain a

crime or a love affair. He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore.

This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader, to

study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing:

he has begun to write to please.

A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back

that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow. For

this reason also the writer, like any other artist, has no resting place, no crowd or

movement in which he may take comfort, no judgment from outside which can

replace the judgment from within. A writer makes order out of the anarchy of

his heart; he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed

of, and when he flirsts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself,

from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point.

nce4_49.txt

Rockets and artificial satellites can go far above the ionosphere, and even escape

from the Earth. Yet they are complex and expensive, and in their present stage

of development they cannot lift massive telescopes, keep them steady while the

observations are being carried out, and then return them safely. Balloons are

much easier to handle, and are also vastly cheaper. Their main limitation is that

they are incapable of rising to the ionosphere. A height of between 80,000 and

90,000 feet is as much as can reasonably be expected, and so balloon-borne instru-

ments can contribute little to either ultra-violet astronomy or X-ray astronomy.

All the same, the balloon has much to be said in its favour, since it can at least

carry heavy equipment above most of the atmospheric mass--thus eliminating

blurring and unsteadiness of the images. Moreover, water-vapour and carbon

dioxide in the lower air absorb most of the infra-red radiations sent to us from

the planets. Balloon ascents overcome this hazard with ease.

Hot-air balloons date back to the year 1783, and within a few months of the

first flight a French scientist, Charles, went up two miles in a free balloon. Yet

there is little resemblance between these crude vehicles and a modern scientific

balloon, which has by now become an important research tool.

The main development has been carried out by M. Schwarlschild and his

team at Princeton University in the United States, in collaboration with the

United States Navy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aero-

nautics and Space Administration. The 'Stratoscope' flights of 1959, concerned

mainly with studies of the Sun, were remarkably successful, and the project has

now been extended. With Stratoscope II, the overall height from the telescope

to the top of the launch balloon is 666 feet, the balloons together weigh over two

tons, and another two tons of ballast are carried for later release if height has

be maintained during the night. The telescope, plus its controls weighs three-

and-a-half tons. Two large parachutes arc also carried; in case of emergency, the

instruments and their records can be separated from the main balloon system,

and brought down gently. Many of the radio and electronic devices used are

similar to those of artificial satellites.

nce4_50.txt

In mediaeval times rivers were the veins of the body politic as well as economic.

Boundaries between states or shires, they were crossed by fords which became

the sites of towns, or by bridges which were often points of battle. Upon rivers

the people of that time depended for food, power and transport.

In our day fish are caught in the sea and brought to us by rail and lorry; only

the angler still thinks fresh-water fish important, and pollution of rivers drives

him into smaller and smaller reaches in which to practise his sport. But in earlier

times, when sea fish were eaten only by those who lived on the sea coast, when

meat was obtainable only for part of the year, and when fasts were frequent and

universally practised, river fish played an important part in the national life.

Every abbey and great man's house had its fish pond, and across the rivers great

and small stretched the fish weirs, usually made of stakes and nets or basket-

work. Between the owners of the fisheries and the bargemaster who needed an

unimpeded passage continuous war was fought, till the importance of fresh-

water fish lessened as the practice of fasting ceased to be universal, as meat be-

came available all the year round, and as the transport of sea fish inland became

practicable.

Rivers were also the most important source of power. Every stream had its

mills, not only for grinding corn, but for all the other industrial processes of the

time, such as fulling* cloth or driving the hammers of ironworks. Placed down

the bank wherever a head of water could be got, these mills were to be found on

the tiny stream that ran through a village, or on the bigger river that was also

used for navigation. An artificial cut was made from the river to bring the water

at proper height to the water-wheel, and, in order to make sure of a supply of

water at all seasons, the mill-owner usually built a weir across the river to hold

back the water and so form an artificial reservoir. If the river were navigable, the

centre of such a weir was made of planks held vertically by cross beams so that

they could be removed when it was necessary to pass a barge, or was fitted with

a single pair of gates. Such weirs were called staunches or flash-locks; they did

not disappear from the bigger rivers till present times, and may still be seen in

the Fens.

• Cleansing and thickening.

nce4_51.txt

Two main techniques have been used for training elephants, which we may call

respectively the tough and the gentle. The former method simply consists of

setting an elephant to work and beating him until he does what is expected of

him. Apart from any moral considerations this is a stupid method of training, for

it produces a resentful animal who at a later stage may well turn man-killer. The

gentle method requires more patience in the early stages, but produces a cheer-

ful, good-tempered elephant who will give many years of loyal service.

The first essential in elephant training is to assign to the animal a single

mahout who will be entirely responsible for the job. Elephants like to have one

master just as dogs do, and are capable of a considerable degree of personal

affection. There are even stories of half-trained elephant calves who have refused

to feed and pined to death when by some unavoidable circumstance they have

been deprived of their own trainer. Such extreme cases must probably be taken

with a grain of salt, but they do underline the general principle that the relation-

ship between elephant and mahout is the key to successful training.

The most economical age to capture an elephant for training is between fifteen

and twenty years, for it is then almost ready to undertake heavy work and can

begin to earn its keep straight away. But animals of this age do not easily become

subservient to man, and a very firm hand must be employed in the early stages.

The captive elephant, still roped to a tree,plunges and screams every time a man

approaches, and for several days will probably refuse all food through anger and

fear. Sometimes a tame elephant is tethered nearby to give the wild one confi-

dence, and in most cases the captive gradually quietens down and begins to

accept its food. The next stage is to get the elephant to the training establishment,

a ticklish business which is achieved with the aid of two tame elephants roped to

the captive on either side.

When several elephants are being trained at one time it is customary for the

new arrival to be placed between the stalls of two captives whose training is

already well advanced. It is then left completely undisturbed with plenty of food

and water so that it can absorb the atmosphere of its new home and see that

nothing particularly alarming is happening to its companions. When it is eating

normally its own training begins. The trainer stands in front of the elephant

holding a long stick with a sharp metal point. Two assistants, mounted or tame

elephants, control the captive from either side, while others rub their hands over

his skin to the accompaniment of a monotonous and soothing chant. This if

supposed to induce pleasurable sensations in the elephant, and its effects are rein-

forced by the use of endearing epithets, such as 'ho ! my son', or 'ho ! my father',

or 'my mother', according to the age and sex of the captive. The elephant is not

immediately susceptible to such blandishments, however, and usually lashes

fiercely with its trunk in all directions. These movements are controlled by the

trainer with the metal-pointed stick, and the trunk eventually becomes so sore

that the elephant curls it up and seldom afterwards uses it for offensive purposes.

nce4_52.txt

An earthquake comes like a thief in the night, without warning. It was necessary,

therefore, to invent instruments that neither slumbered nor slept. Some devices

were quite simple. one, for instance, consisted of rods of various lengths and

thicknesses which would stand up on end like ninepins. when a shock came it

shook the rigid table upon which these stood. If it were gentle, only the more

unstable rods fell. If it were severe, they all fell. Thus the rods by falling, and by

the direction in which they fell, recorded for the slumbering scientist the strength

of a shock that was too weak to waken him and the direction from which it came.

But instruments far more delicate than that were needed if any really serious

advance was to be made. The ideal to be aimed at was to devise an instrument

that could record with a pen on paper the movements, of the ground or of the

table, as the quake passed by. While I write my pen moves, but the paper keeps

still. With practice, no doubt, I could in time learn to write by holding the

still while the paper moved. That sounds a silly suggestion, but that was precisely

the idea adopted in some of the early instruments (seismometers) for recording

earthquake waves. But when table, penholder and paper are all moving how is

it possible to write legibly? The key to a solution of that problem lay in an every-

day observation. Why does a person standing in a bus or train tend to fall when

a sudden start is made? It is because his feet move on, but his head stays still.

A simple experiment will help us a little further. Tie a heavy weight at the end

of a long piece of string. With the hand held high in the air hold the strings so that

the weight nearly touches the ground. Now move the hand to and fro and around

but not up and down. It will be found that the weight moves but slightly or not

at all. Imagine a pen attached to the weight in such a way that its point rests upon

a piece of paper on the floor. Imagine an earthquake shock shaking the floor, the

paper, you and your hand. In the midst of all this movement the weight and the

pen would be still. But as the paper moved from side to side under the pen point

its movement would be recorded in ink upon its surface. It was upon this prin-

ciple that the first instruments were made, but the paper was wrapped round a

drum which rotated slowly. As long as all was still the pen drew a straight line,

but while the drum was being shaken the line that the pen was drawing wriggled

from side to side. The apparatus thus described, however, records only the

horizontal component of the wave movement, which is, in fact, much more com-

plicated. If we could actually see the path described by a particle, such as a sand

grain in the rock, it would be more like that of a bluebottle buzzing round the

room; it would be up and down, to and fro and from side to side. Instruments

have been devised and can he so placed that all three elements can be recorded

in different graphs.

When the instrument is situated at more than 700 miles from the earthquake

centre, the graphic record shows three waves arriving one after the other at

short intervals. The first records the arrival of longitudinal vibrations. The sec-

ond marks the arrival of transverse vibrations which travel more slowly and

arrive several minutes after the first. These two have travelled through the earth.

It was from the study of these that so much was learnt about the interior of the

earth. The third, or main wave, is the slowest and has travelled round the earth

through the surface rocks.

nce4_53.txt

The French Foreign Legion was founded by a Royal Ordinance, written on a

small piece of official French War Office notepaper dated March 9th, 1831, and

signed by the then reigning monarch of France, Louis-Philippe. He had been on

the throne for barely eight months when he authorized this measure, which was

as much a product of necessity as of careful planning, although there may be

divided views on this.

The reasons for forming the French Foreign Legion were probably twofold.

In the first place the men of the disbanded royal bodyguard and the Regiment of

Hohenlohe, suddenly turned loose on to the street of a capital seething with un-

rest, unemployed and perhaps disgruntled at their abrupt dismissal, were a po-

tentially dangerous element. They were trained to the use of arms, and should

they become tools of the politically ambitious or discontented they would present

a distinct menace to the new regime, not yet too firmly established and sure of

itself.

For some time Paris had been swarming with countless other discharged

foreign soldiers who had served in the French army at various times under the

Empire and the Republic, many of whom were in needy circumstances and open

to suggestion, whilst others were openly looking for trouble and always ready to

take part in any disturbance. It was clearly both expedient and desirable to re-

move these dangers as far away from the capital as possible.

Next, the Algerian adventure had begun, and it appeared that this might prove

expensive in lives. The more Frenchmen killed in North Africa, the less popular

the government at home would be, so if foreign cannon fodder was available so

much the better. The Algerian landing had been viewed with mixed feelings in

a politically divided France, but there does not seem to have been, any marked

indication on the part of the politicians that they were unanimous that the occu-

pation should be abruptly terminated; most were wary and many apprehensive

as to how the Algerian business would turn out.

The formation of a foreign legion seemed therefore to be an ideal method of

killing these two birds with one stone. Once the conditions were made clear there

does not seem o have been any serious opposition.

Marshal Soult was reputed to be the man behind the scheme both for remov-

ing and using the unemployed foreign ex-soldiers. He could not have failed to

recognize, once they were formed into disciplined units, how useful they would

be, both for garrison duty and for active operations in Algeria, nor the fact that

if their casualties were heavy or their conditions not of the best, there would be

no embarrassing reaction for agitation in France on their behalf.

The Royal Ordinance decreed that there should be a legion formed

foreigners for service outside France, which was to be called the 'Foreign

Legion' and it was to be part of the French army and under the control of the

War Minister. It laid down that as far as possible companies should be composed

of men of the same nationality or who spoke a common language. Algeria was not

specifically mentioned but as it was the only scrap of foreign territory of any size

possessed by France at that moment, there was no doubt as to the meaning of

the phrase 'outside France'.

In the anxiety to get dubious, restless characters out of the country no ques-

tions were asked as to nationality, previous record or history, and no proof of

identity was required. The name and particulars given by the recruit were

accepted at face value and many gave noms de guerre,* for understandable rea-

sons. Thus the practice began, and the tradition started of 'asking no questions'.

This tradition of guaranteeing anonymity began to develop quickly, although it

was not until later that it was carried to the extreme of denying all knowledge of

any individuals who were in its ranks and of refusing point blank to answer

questions or to allow any outside contact with the legionnaires.

• Pseudonyms.

nce4_54.txt

We must conclude from the work of those who have studied the origin of life,

that given a planet only approximately like our own, life is almost certain to

start. Of all the planets in our own solar system we arc now pretty certain the

Earth is the only one on which life can survive. Mars is too dry and poor in

oxygen, Venus far too hot, and so is Mercury, and the outer planets have tem-

peratures near absolute zero and hydrogen-dominated atmospheres. But other

suns, stars as the astronomers call them, are bound to have planets like our own,

and as the number of stars in the universe is so vast, this possibility becomes

virtual certainty. There are one hundred thousand million stars in our own

Milky Way alone, and then there are three thousand million other Milky Ways,

or Galaxies, in the universe. So the number of stars that we know exist is

estimated at about 300 million million million.

Although perhaps only 1 per cent of the life that has started somewhere will

develop into highly complex and intelligent patterns, so vast is the number of

planets that intelligent life is bound to be a natural part of the universe.

If then we are so certain that other intelligent life exists in the universe, why

have we had no visitors from outer space yet ? First of all, they may have come to

this planet of ours thousands or millions of years ago, and found our then pre-

vailing primitive state completely uninteresting to their own advanced knowledge.

Professor Ronald Bracewell, a leading American radio-astronomer, argued in

Nature that such a superior civilization, on a visit to our own solar system, may-

have left an automatic messenger behind to await the possible awakening of an

advanced civilization. Such a messenger, receiving our radio and television sig-

nals, might well re-transmit them back to its home-planet, although what im-

pression any other civilization would thus get from us is best left unsaid.

But here we come up against the most difficult of all obstacles to contact with

people on other planets--the astronomical distances which separate us. As a

reasonable guess, they might, on an average, be 100 light years away. (A light

year is the distance which light travels at 186,000 miles per second in one year,

namely 6 million million miles.) Radio waves also travel at the speed of light,

and assuming such an automatic messenger picked up our first broadcasts of the

1920's, the message to its home planet is barely halfway there. Similarly, our

own Present primitive chemical rockets, though good enough to orbit men, have

no chance of transporting us to the nearest other star, four light years away, let

alone distances of tens or hundreds of light years.

Fortunately, there is a 'uniquely rational way' for us to communicate with

other intelligent beings, as Walter Sullivan has put it in his excellent recent book,

We are not alone. This depends on the precise radio-frequency of the 21-cm

wavelength, or 1420 megacycles per second. It is the natural frequency of emis-

sion of the hydrogen atoms in space and was discovered by us in 1951; it must

be known to any kind of radio-astronomer in the universe.

Once the existence of this wave-length had been discovered, it was not long

before its use as the uniquely recognizable broadcasting frequency for interstellar

communication was suggested. Without something of this kind, searching for

intelligences on other planets would be like trying to meet a friend in London

without a Pre-arranged rendezvous and absurdly wandering the streets in the

hope of a chance encounter.

nce4_55.txt

Custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great moment. The

inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation,

but custom have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As

a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world

over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person

can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather

trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant

role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it

may manifest.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a

definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philo-

sophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of

the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional cus-

toms. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in

shaping the behaviour of the individual as over against any way in which he can

affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his

mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up

into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies the social orders

that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no

more than an exact and matter-off-fact observation. The life history of the indi-

vidual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards

traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the

customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time

he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and

able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its

impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will

share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe

can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more in-

cumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are

intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life

must remain unintelligible.

The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propo-

sitions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently

opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferen-

tial weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its con-

sideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or

the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant

material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way

we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the

social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major

social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western

civilization.

Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions be-

tween ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and

the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that

degree,of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our

neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions

which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be con-

sidered together, our own among the rest.

nce4_56.txt

Science and technology have come to pervade every aspect of our lives and, as a

result, society is changing at a speed which is quite unprecedented. There is a

great technological explosion around us, generated by science. This explosion is

already freeing vast numbers of people from their traditional bondage to nature,

and now at last we have it in our power to free mankind once and for all from the

fear which is based on want. Now, for the first time, man can reasonably begin

to think that life can be something more than a grim struggle for survival. But

even today, in spite of the high standard of living which has become general in

the more fortunate West, the majority of people in the world still spend nearly

all their time and energy in a never-ending struggle with nature to secure the

food and shelter they need. Even in this elementary effort millions of human

beings each year die unnecessarily and wastefully from hunger, disease, or flood.

Yet,in the West, science and technology have made it possible for us to have

a plentiful supply of food, produced by only a fraction of the labour that was

necessary even a few decades ago. In the United States, for instance, one man on

the land produces more than enough food to feed fifteen men in the cities, and,

in fact, there is a surplus of food grown even by this small proportion of the

American labour force. We have considerably extended our expectation of life.

We have enriched our lives by creating physical mobility through the motor-car,

the jet aeroplane, and other means of mechanical transport; and we have added

to our intellectual mobility by the telephone, radio, and television. Not content

with these advances, we are now thrusting forward to the stars, and the conquest

o space no longer strikes us as Wellsian or Jules Vernian. And with the advent

of the new phase of technology we call automation, we have the promise both of

greater leisure and of even greater material and intellectual riches.

But this is not inevitable. It depends on automation being adequately ex-

ploited. We shall need to apply our scientific and technological resources to

literally every aspect of our society, to our commerce, our industry, our medicine,

our agriculture, our transportation.

It is fascinating and encouraging to observe the development of this immense

process, a process in which man appears all the time to be engaged in the act of

creating an extension of himself. In his new technological successes this appears

particularly true. He is extending his eyes with radar; his tongue and his ear

through telecommunication; his muscle and body structure through mechaniza-

tion. He extends his own energies by the generation and transmission of power

and his nervous system and his thinking and decision-making faculties through

automation. If this observation is accurate, as I believe it is, the implications are

far-reaching. It might be reasonable to conclude that the direction of modern

science and technology is towards the creation of a series of machine-systems

based on man as a model.

nce4_57.txt

In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been critical.

But this phase of our development is now finished. Indeed, we lack practice and

experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. I am sure that, with-

out modern weapons, I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership

of a cave with a bear, and in this I do not think that I stand alone. The last creature

to compete with man was the mosquito. But even the mosquito has been subdued

by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays.

Competition between ourselves, person against person, community against

community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was.

But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned

in biology. It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined

by the physical environment, because the environment that determines our evo-

lution is no longer essentially physical. Our environment is chiefly conditioned

by the things we believe. Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very

similar latitudes, both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates, and

probably with rather similar natural resources. Yet their present development is

wholly different, not so much because of different people even, but because of the

different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants. This is the point

I wish to emphasize. The most important factor in our environment is the state

of our own minds.

It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture the

most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas.

Ideas are dangerous. The Holy office knew this full well when it caused heretics

to be burned in days gone by. Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in

our modem society because when you are inside a community you are condi-

tioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree that it is very

difficult to conceive of anything really destructive. It is only someone looking on

from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts. I do not doubt that it would

be possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us.

I would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so. Perhaps it

will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb. Imagine the effect on a reasonably ad-

vanced technological society, one that still does not possess the bomb, of making

it aware of the possibility, of supplying sufficient details to enable the thing to be

constructed. Twenty or thirty pages of information handed to any of the major

world powers around the year 1925 would have been sufficient to change the

course of world history. It is a strange thought, but I believe a correct one, that

twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information would be capable of turning the

present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. I have often tried to con-

ceive of what those pages might contain, but of course I cannot do so because

I am a prisoner of the present-day world, just as all of you are. We cannot think

outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or, to be more

accurate, we can think only a very little way outside, and then only if we are

very original.

nce4_58.txt

A gifted American psychologist has said, 'Worry is a spasm of the emotion; the

mind catches hold of something and will not let it go.' It is useless to argue with

the mind in this condition. The stronger the will, the more futile the task. One

can only gently insinuate something else into its convulsive grasp. And if this

something else is rightly chosen, if it is really attended by the illumination of an-

other field of interest, gradually, and often quite swiftly, the old undue grip

relaxes and the process of recuperation and repair begins.

The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of

first importance to a public man. But this is not a business that can be under-

taken in a day or swiftly improvised by a mere command of the will. The growth

of alternative mental interests is a long process. The seeds must be carefully

chosen; they must fall on good ground; they must be sedulously tended, if the

vivifying fruits are to be at hand when needed.

To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three

hobbies, and they must all be real. It is no use starting late in life to say: 'I will

take an interest in this or that.' Such an attempt only aggravates the strain of

mental effort. A man may acquire great knowledge of topics unconnected with

his daily work, and yet hardly get any benefit or relief. It is no use doing what

you like, you have got to like what you do. Broadly speaking, human beings may

be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried

to death, and those who are bored to death. It is no use offering the manual

labourer, tired out with a hard week's sweat and effort, the chance of playing a

game of football or baseball on Saturday afternoon. It is no use inviting the poli-

tician or the professional or business man, who has been working or worrying

about serious things for six days, to work or worry about trifling things at the

week-end.

As for the unfortunate people who can command everything they want, who

can gratify every caprice and lay their hands on almost every object of desire-

for them a new pleasure, a new excitement is only an additional satiation. In

vain they rush frantically round from place to place, trying to escape from aveng-

ing boredom by mere clatter and motion. For them discipline in one form or

another is the most hopeful path.

It may also be said that rational, industrious, useful human beings are divided

into two classes: first, those whose work is work and whose pleasure is pleasure;

and secondly, those whose work and pleasure are one. Of these the former are

the majority. They have their compensations. The long hours in the office or the

factory bring with them as their reward, not only the means of sustenance, but

a keen appetite for pleasure even in its simplest and most modest forms. But

fortune's favoured children belong to the second class. Their life is a natural

harmony. For them the working hours are never long enough. Each day is a

holiday, and ordinary holidays when they come are grudged as enforced inter-

ruptions in an absorbing vocation. Yet to both classes the need of an alternative

outlook, of a change of atmosphere, of a diversion of effort, is essential. Indeed,

it may well be that those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need

the means of banishing it at intervals from their mi

nce4_59.txt

Economy is one powerful motive for camping, since after the initial outlay upon

equipment, or through hiring it, the total expense can be far less than the cost of

hotels. But, contrary to a popular assumption, it is far from being the only one,

or even the greatest. The man who manoeuvres carelessly into his five shillings

worth of space at one of Europe's myriad permanent sites may find himself

bumping a Bentley. More likely, Ford Consul will be hub to hub with Renault

or Mercedes, but rarely with bicycles made for two.

That the equipment of modern camping becomes yearly more sophisticated is

an entertaining paradox for the cynic, a brighter promise for the hopeful traveller

who has sworn to get away from it all. It also provides--and some student sociolo-

gist might care to base his thesis upon the phenomenon--an escape of another

kind. The modern traveller is often a man who dislikes the Splendide and the

Bellavista, not because he cannot afford, or shuns, their meterial comforts, but

because he is afraid of them. Affluent he may be, but he is by no means sure what,

to tip the doorman or the chambermaid. Master in his own house, he has little

idea of when to say boo to a maitre d'hotel.*

From all such fears camping releases him. Granted, a snobbery of camping

itself, based upon equipment and techniques, already exists, but it is of a kind

that, if he meets it, he can readily understand and deal with. There is no superior

'they' in the shape of managements and hotel hierarchies to darken his holiday

days.

To such motives, yet another must be added. The contemporary phenomenon

of motor-car worship is to be explained not least by the sense of independence

and freedom that ownership entails. To this pleasure camping gives an exquisite

refinement.

From one's own front door to home or foreign hills or sands and back again,

everything is to hand. Not only are the means of arriving at the holiday paradise

entirely within one's own command and keeping, but the means of escape from

holiday hell (if the beach proves too crowded, the local weather too inclement)

are there, outside--or, as likely, part of--the tent.

Idealists have objected to the practice of camping, as to the packaged tour,

that the traveller abroad thereby denies himself the opportunity of getting to

know the people of the country visited. Insularity and self-containment, it is

argued, go hand in hand. The opinion does not survive experience of a popular

Continental camping place. Holiday hotels tend to cater for one nationality of

visitors especially, sometimes exclusively. Camping sites, by contrast, are highly

cosmopolitan. Granted, a preponderance of Germans is a characteristic that.

seems common to most Mediterranean sites; but as yet there is no overwhelm-

ingly specialized patronage. Notices forbidding the open-air drying of clothes,

or the use of water points for car washing, or those inviting 'our camping friends'

to a dance or a boat trip are printed not only in French or Italian or Spanish,

but also in English, German and Dutch. At meal times the odour of sauerkraut

vies with that of garlic. The Frenchman's breakfast coffee competes with the

Englishman's bacon and eggs.

Whether the remarkable growth of organized camping means the eventual

death of the more independent kind is hard to say. Municipalities naturally want

to secure the campers' site fees and other custom. Police are wary of itinerants

who cannot be traced to a recognized camp boundary or to four walls. But most

probably it will all depend upon campers themselves: how many heath fires they

cause, how much litter they leave, in short, whether or not they wholly alienate

landowners and those who live in the countryside. Only good scouting is likely

to preserve the freedoms so dear to the heart of the eternal Boy Scout.

nce4_60.txt

Although truth and justice may be the most powerful impulses to show moral

courage, there are others. Compassion is one of these. Tentatively it can be sug-

gested that this is the main influence upon those who urge the abolition of capital

punishment. It is recognition of compassion's part that leads the upholders of

capital punishment to accuse the abolitionists of sentimentality in being more

sorry for the murderer than for his victim. This is nonsense but with it some

organs of the popular Press played upon the emotions of their readers so success-

fully that many candidates for Parliament were afraid to support abolition for

fear of losing votes and the result was the muddle-headed Homicide Act of 1957

which made murder with robbery a capital crime and allowed the poisoner to

escape the gallows. That illogical qualification shows how flimsy is the argument

that capital punishment is a deterrent to murder. The poisoner always works on

a calculated plan of action and therefore is able to consider whether or not his

taking another's life is worth the risk of his own; the violent thief is usually at

the mercy of an instant emotion. The only arguable plea for capital punishment

is the right of society to retribution in this world with the prospect of life in

another, but since what used to seem to the great majority of civilized humanity

the assurance of another life beyond the grave has come to seem to more and

more people less certain, a feeling for the value of human life has become deeper

and more widespread. This may seem a paradoxical claim to make at a time when

mankind is so much preoccupied with weapons of destruction. Nevertheless, it

is a claim that can be sustained and if compassion animates those who urge the

abolition of the death penalty it is not a sentimental compassion for the mental

agony inflicted upon a condemned man but a dread of destroying the miracle of

life.

When in the eighteenth century offences against the law that today would no

earn a month in prison were punished with the death penalty, the severity of the

penal code had no serious effect on the prevalence of crime. When it made no

difference to the fate of a highwayman whether he had killed his victim or merely

robbed him of a few pieces of silver, there were no more murders then than there

were when men like Sir Fraricis Burdett succeeded in lightening the excessive

severity of the penal laws. In those days the sacredness of life on earth was not

greatly regarded because a life in the world to come was taken for granted except

by a comparatively small minotity of philosophers.

Nor was the long-drawn ordeal of the condemned cell inflicted either upon

the condemned man or his gaolers once upon a time. Those who believe in capital

punishment may have arguments for its retention, but surely no reasonable

argument can be found for retention of the sickening mumbo-jumbo that accom-

panies it from the moment that the judge dons the black cap with what looks like

a pen-wiper balanced on the top of his wig, to the reading of the burial service

over the condemned man before he is dead. Moreover, it was more merciful to

launch the condemned man into eternity twenty-four hours after he was sen-

tenced than to keep him shivering on the brink of that dread gulf for nearly three

weeks. Hanging is an atrociously archaic way of killing a human being and the

self-satisfied modernity of the electric chair is just as atrocious. The administra-

tion of a strong sleeping draught to the condemned man every night from which

one night he does hot awake, seems a more civilized alternative to our present

barbarous procedure, if capital punishment through the influence of backward

minds be retained.