676 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



insists on teaching its children the living truths of God's living Universe. . . . 

 The man who says that men would be degraded by science knows nothing about 

 science and less about men." 



It is good to know that Zeppelins as big as cigars have been sighted ! When 

 some people wish to describe the angle subtended by a body such as a comet or 

 a Zeppelin at a distance from the eye they are very apt to say that the said body 

 appeared a foot or a yard or so in length ; and we all remember the classical case 

 in which a cloud was described as being " like a man's hand." But as the 

 describer does not define how far off the foot or yard or man's hand is from the 

 eye, the listener is unable to form any notion whatever of the angle referred to. 

 It shows how defective our system of education is, that this type of description 

 appears in our press after each Zeppelin raid, and harrows the intelligent reader 

 almost as much as the bombs do. For instance, one evening paper of September 

 25, 1916, said that a Zeppelin "did not look more than six or eight feet long." 

 The Pall Mall, of a forgotten date, made an equally brilliant remark ; but horror 

 really entered into our souls when the great Times of September 27 said that a 

 Zeppelin " looked only about the size of a big cigar." Now, a cigar may look any 

 size according to the distance it is held from the observer's eye. If it is an inch 

 from the nose a cigar will subtend nearly half the horizon, and if it is a yard away 

 it will look smaller, and at a mile's distance will be invisible. Which of all these 

 distances are we to apply to the description of "our own correspondent"? Yet 

 the Times is the Boanerges of the classical (? grammatical) education. Again, 

 on October 3, another correspondent tells us in the Times that "with the aid of a 

 night-glass she appeared about a yard long (experts can estimate how high she 

 was)" ! Some people seem to think that experts can do anything. 



In the Poetry Review for January last Mr. Theodore Maynard says that "For 

 the last twenty years or more poetry has been left by the English to languish in 

 the dungeons of derision. The very nation which has produced more great poets 

 than the rest of the world combined has treated its poets worst." The accusation 

 was, of course, immediately and indignantly repudiated in the press, as, for instance, 

 in the Literary Supplement. The truth of it can, however, be easily demonstrated 

 by figures. That fine literary review, the Supplement itself, actually boasts that 

 it sells over thirty thousand copies every week. Taking the population of the 

 United Kingdom at forty-five millions, we see that only one copy of the Supplement 

 is sold for every thirteen hundred and fifty persons in the kingdom — not counting 

 the Colonies — surely a quite insignificant proportion. The price of the Supplement 

 is one penny, and yet every day in the trains we see hundreds of worthy citizens 

 reading trash of the same monetary value purchased several times daily. As a 

 writer in Science Progress for October last pointed out, " We may doubt 

 whether, excepting reprints of classical works, sold chiefly for prizes and presents, 

 and ' topical verses,' as many as five thousand books of poetry are disposed of 

 annually to the forty-odd millions of people in the country." Yet, as poetry may 

 be defined as the perfected utterance of the human spirit, we might suppose that 

 a larger proportion of people in an intelligent country might take some interest in 

 it. Probably, however, not one Briton in a thousand ever looks at it. To me it 

 seems that the neglect of poetry is due to the same cause as the neglect of science, 

 namely, intellectual sloth or a low standard of intelligence ; and philosophy, art, 

 sanitation, and nearly all the branches of effort which are really useful to the 

 human race are in the same case, while games, party-politics, money-making, low 

 drama, and dogma are the things which most interest us as a nation. 



At two meetings of the Poetry Society (16 Featherstone Buildings, Holborn, 



