Review ef Reviewt, Ift/OS. 



Leading Articles. 



179 



THE PARASITE OF SPORT. 



Mr. Guv Thome, author of " When it was Dark," 

 opens C. B. Frys Magazine with a ver\- straight and 

 stem talk on sport and drink. Nearly ever)- good 

 thing has its parasite, and he is in no doubt about 

 the parasite of modern sport. He says: — 



The more popular games of England are being disturbed 

 and discredited in a marked manner by the plain, vulgar 

 excem in alcohol which surrounds them. A great number 

 of sportsmen know this perfectly well, and genuinely de- 

 plore it; but I am not aware that the subject has been 

 properly ventilated as yet, save perhape by " temperance " 

 cranks, and prejudiced or ignorant people, who hide a 

 polemic puritanism under the banner of a misused word. 



FOOTBALL DEGRADED. 



He traces the effect on football : — 



A Blue-book of statistics of crime for 1904 has just been 

 issued. From it I find that drunkenness is greatest in the 

 great football centres of the \orlh and of Wales. The 

 thirstiest parts of the country are those in which football 

 is the most eagerly played and watched, where the man in 

 the street is a football expert. 



He quotes a North-country baronet, a famous 



sportsman in his day, an ex-^linister, who said that 



in his district the abuse of drink was ruining the local 



sport : — 



" Dec«nt people no longer care to attend football 

 matches," he says; "the element of drink and ruffianism 

 is becoming too much in evidence. A new class of spec- 

 tators has been created, men who care little or nothing 

 for the sport itself, but who use a match as a mere oppor- 

 tunity and an excuse for drinking." 



GOLFING SHEBEENS. 



Golf, too, has not escaped. Many of the golfing 

 clubs, he says, are little better than shebeens for 

 comfortable over-indulgence in drink. In many of 

 the smaller golf clubs drinking has almost destroyed 

 the game itself. Pugilism is another sport which is 

 being ruined and degraded by drink. He says : — 



How often do we not observe that a sportsman has a 

 brilliant public career for a time, and then suddenly dis- 

 appears from the first rank — " drops out," and is no more 

 heard of? His sporting life is brilliant, but it is short. 



Nevertheless, in too many cases, the athlete unconsciously 

 shortens his sporting career by the too free use of alcohol. 

 He of all people can least afford to overstep the bounds 

 of strict moderation, yet the comradeship of sport, Its 

 jolly, social side, brings with it great temptations, and 

 temptations which are daily increasing. 



THE EFFECT ON THE SPORTSMAN'S BRAIN. 



This is his argument: — 



The athlete, the true sportsman, depends a» much upon the 

 condition of his brain for success as upon the condition of his 

 body. 



At a critical moment in a game (let us say) the cerebel- 

 lum, or " little brain." fails for a single instant to transmit 

 its message, via the nerve telegraphs of the body, to tlie 

 motor muscles. The catch is missed, the pass is made half 

 a second too late. t.h6 little extra dose of alcohol has dis- 

 organised the accurate execution of muscular action, and 

 perhaps a match is lost, a sportsman's career definitely 

 injured. 



HOW TO HARNESS THE SUN. 



Mr. Henry S. Pritchett in the Windsor writes on 

 the tools of the future. Hand tools, he says, will 

 always remain; but they take second place in the 

 world's work. The tools of the future are the great 

 machines which can most skilfully and most econo- 

 mically harness the sun's energy to the world's work. 

 At present the processes are indirect and second- 

 hand, yet the facts present a great invitation: — 



When the son is nearly overhead, he delivers power at 

 the surface of the earth at the rate of more than two 

 horse-power for each square yard of surface. Even after 

 deducting the loss occasioned by the absorption of the 

 earth's atmosphere, it is still true that each square yard 

 receives when the sun is shining the equivalent of one 

 horse-power working continuously. This means that there 

 is delivered on each square yard an energy able to lift a 

 weight or thirty-three thousand pounds one foot in one 

 minute, and tliis power is continuous. 



The sun delivers on Hampstead Heath, free of charge, four 

 times enough energy to warm and light London and supply 

 all its manufactories, street railroads, and other consumers 

 of mechanical power. 



On the broad, sunlit plains of Arizona, the sun delivers 

 an equivalent of mechanical energy which, expressed in 

 horse-power, would seem almost infinite. A small part of 

 it would suffice for the whole world's work. Why is it not 

 set to doing this work? 



This is the problem of to-morrow. 



It is pleasant to be informed that the engineer has 

 made great progress to a solution : — 



He has enormously improvei the means by which indirect 

 sun energy ia used; he transforms heat energy into me- 

 chanical energy, and this, again, into electric energy; he 

 has even devised a solar engine, which will take up the 

 energy as tlie sun delivers it and convert that energy— 

 wastefullv, to be sure — into a form suitable for use; but 

 the problem of storing this power and applying it when 

 and where man may need il — that problem is the problem 

 of the future. 



"THEBES OF THE HUNDRED GATES." 



By Mr. H. Rider Haggard. 



Mr. Rider Haggard contributes to the I'all Mall 

 Magazine for June an interesting article on Thebes. 

 Cairo, he says, has become a fashion resort ; there- 

 fore let the antiquarian get away up the Nile. It is 

 450 miles to Luxor, and even here there are tourists, 

 but tourists who have come to learn something of 

 Egypt. He describes the Luxor of to-day. and then 

 in a fascinating manner looks with the eyes of ima- 

 gination upon the place as it was 3000 or more years 

 ago, the Imperial Thebes, the Thebes of the Hun- 

 dred Gates. 



THE VALLEY OF DEAD KINGS. 



Here is what he writes of the Valley of Dead 

 Kings : — 



It is a solemn and indeed an awful place, naked and sere 

 to the eye, blasted as it were into everlasting barrenness 

 by the very breath of Osiris, god of the dead. 



Behold! a little space of time has passed, and our mighty 

 ruler of the Upper and the Lower Land, or his father, the 

 beauteous Seti, or his son, Meneptah, he from whom the 

 Israelites fled, but who did not die in the Red Sea, for his 

 body lies in the museum at Cairo— it matters not which 

 of them~is being brought, amidst a people's lamentations, 

 to his last splendid home, which during his life days he has 

 patiently hollowed in the deep mountain side. 



There 'they lay him, and there they leave him at rest 

 amidst the funeral gifts and offerings, till a thousand 

 years or so later the priests hurriedly, at dead of night, 

 hide him in the pit of Der-el-Bahari. 



Here for another two thousand years or so he sleeps on. 

 till the Arab tomb-robbers come, and after them the 

 French officials, and amidst the sound of Egyptian women 

 weeping over the desecration of the mummies of their 

 ancient kings, all that remains of his mortal majesty is 

 borne down the Nile to deck the shelves of the museum at 



These few acres of ground were their Westminster Abbey: 

 one of the gre-atest things that a man among them could 

 hope for was that his statue might be accorded the hononr 

 of a place in its side chapels. It« head priests were arch- 

 bishops; up those stairs its kings climbed to the dignity 

 of gods. Its priests have been numbered by tens of thou- 

 sands; tens of millions have here poured out their hearts 

 in adoration to that supreme Divinity known by many 

 names, whereon the whole world cries out for succour and 

 salvation. .'\nd to-night, to-night, what is there? 



