FRIENDLY JELLY-FISH

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 152, 22 March 1919, Page 8

FRIENDLY JELLY-FISH

PROFESSOR D'ARCY THOMPSON'S LECTURE TO 'CHILDREN.

"Adapted to a juvenile auditory" is the official description of the Christmas lectures at the Koyal institution. There have been 92 courses of them, and the ninety-third was given by Professor D'Arcy W. Thompson, who discourses on natural history in the University of St. Andrew's.

To be a success at the Royal Institution at Christmas (whatever be the conditions prevailing during the rest, of the year) a man must be a professor and something more. Not only must he wear his framing lightly as a (lower, but liis understanding of children must bo as complete as sympathy can make it.

It is difficult to conceive a professor at once more absorbed ill his theme and more capable of absorbing other people than Professor Thompson. He talked of jelly-fishes, and if a live jelly-fish had been there you, might have heard the waving of its tentacles, so still and intent was the audience. The jelly-fish proved so delightful in the hands of Professor Thompson (hat Ihe audience must have blushed for shame, when there was darkness for the pictures, lo think of having ever maligned them as horrid stinging creatures. Ho revealed them as beings not so very unlike ourselves as you might suppose; capable of emotion and .ecstasy, capable alsj of lasting friendship. The tie that hinds a jelly-fish to a baby codfish suggested a parallel to David and Jonathan; and the new poets, anxious to get away from (ho hackneyed, might do worse than go lo the sea for fresh examples to humanity.

Without having exhausted jelly-fish, Professor Thompson went on to hydras— not the companions of "Gorgoiis and Chimnerns dire," but those wonderfully economical little beasts who grow new legs and heads as soon as tho iirat are cut ofl'. In the eighteenth century, when hydras were introduced, so to sneak, Voltaire was deeply concerned in them. As Professor Thompson put. it, Frenchmen had a particular reason for such curiosity a hundred years ago; when losing one's head was a common accident it was consoling to find something that didn't mind the operation a bit.

Tho hero of the lecture, however, was neither jelly-fish nor hydra, but a sea anemone. Heroine would be the better word, since the' name the creature went by was "Granny." Sho was caught ■young b,v'Sir John Graham Dalziel, tho Scottish naturalist of a century ago, who did so much for the reputation of jelly-fish and their kindred. Sir John fed her till the day of his death; two foster-parents afterwards adopted her in succession, and then she fell to a botanist, who let her die. But she had lived, to men's knowledge, 60 years; and her death was celebrated in a half-column obituary notice in the "Scotsman." Professor Thompson knew "Grnnnv" in bis boyhood, but did not say whether the diet she found so nourishing was thai which he himself gave to an anemone on the table, before him—oyster scraps. A glance at the builders of coral was so brief as to bo tantalising. Soon after the clock struck four, and everybody was inclined to rebel against the lecturer's explanation that it was a magic clock which stopped professors talking. But tho ideal lecturer to children is a little bit of an autocrat, so the stnr-fishes, cray-fishes, and cuttle-fishes had to be postponed lo other afternoons, along with the herring-fishery and tho whalefishery.

The ltev. Father F. S, Hartley, chaplain of the forces, has been recuperating at Jiotorua after two years' service at the front. Ho was attached to the 3rd Wellington Battalion, and saw the heavy lighting at llesjines, I.a Bassoville, and Passchendaele, taking J\is plaeo with the stretcher-bearers and witnessing all the horrors and glories of the titanic struggles which took placo on that historic front. Ho has many incidents to relate of extraordinary happenings. On one occasion ho was one of the stretcherbearers to attend to the men who suffered from an eneiuy high explosive shell striking their luit. Pour were killed, three <jf them brothers who had not yet been in tlio trenches, and a dozen were wounded, alt New Zealandcrs. Ho is full of admiration for the Australians and New Zealanders, t'eniarking, "I am proud to liavo been born in Australia and to have been a Sew Zealander by adoption for 18 years." He says that the New Zealand Division was the best equipped and the best all-round division on tlio front. He gives great praise to General Russell, and says that General Godley must bo given credit for the manner in which the efficiency of the division was maintained. Pather Barlley did not come through scatjiless. A touch of gas' at Jlessiues did not trouble him much, but rheumatic fever contracted in Polygon Wood (Ypros sector) was a more serious matter, from the effects of which he has not yet wholly recovered

When a New Zealand transport was in (lie Indian Ocean oil May 21, 1917, a hot tie was thrown overboard, in which was a slip of paper bearing the names of Sergeant Cowie (Woodgrove), Corporal J. C. Dixon (Waimate), and Troopers Tom and Cliff Spellman (Palmcrston North). The bottle was picked up near the mouth of (ho Julia Hiver (East Africa), on September 2i, 1018, and forwarded to the Timiini "Herald." Trooper Tom Spellman, who returned to Palinerston about a month ago, hns just learnt that; the message east into ihe sea nearly two years ago has 6afely arrived in New Zealand.