The Daily News. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1912. MODERN INVENTIONS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 172, 7 December 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1912. MODERN INVENTIONS.

The world is peopled with a perverse and hard-necked generation, whose scoffing is only equalled by their credulity, and the many inventions of modernity have to fight their way to acceptance over a myriad of obstacles of prejudice and disbelief. It took Iron centuries to oust the Stone Age, just as it took all the power of the kettle boilers of George Stephenson's first steam engine to push the yellow-bellied Tally-ho off the coaching roads of the world. The imaginative humorists and fiction writers of a decade or two ago would be covered in shame if they could but materialise again and find their romantic imaginings no longer figments of their 'fancies, but plain every-day commermlitiea. Dean Swift's classic college, where the ancient professors were weaving cloth from the fine-spun web of the spider is no longer a dream, and although we have not yet succeeded in making sunbeams from cucumbers he would be a bold man who would care to maintain that the operation is not humanly possible, nor have we as yet, in the words of Hilarion, sent a wire to the moon or taught the little pigs how to fly, but with wireless telegraphy and the conquest of the air these miracles have come well within the range of practical politics. In fact, even Baron Munchausen's elaborate challenge to Ananias would read to-day more like biography than pure unadulterated fiction. The talkers, in fact, have given place to the doers, and the Murdochs and the Sandfords of yesterday have had to stand down for the Edisons and the Marconis of to-day. But the crowning miracle of the age is that reported in a cable received yesterday, in which Professor Forward reports the discovery of a method by which sawdust when treated irith sulphurous acid and submitted to hydraulic pressure can Be transformed unto sugar suitable for feeding to cattle. The Sugar Commission will have to look i to its laurels and revise its report, for nothing is more certain than that this is but an elementary step towards the production of the pure commercial product. One could hardly conceive of two more extreme materials than sawdust and sugar, and the marriage of sawdust i with sulphurous acid would never have been expected to throw stock of a saccharine character. If our forbears could play the part of Rip van Winkle and return to t Ills earth they would probably hasten incontinently tore-don their little

wooden ulsters and hasten back to their graves. This latest modern invention simply serves to show that "everything is possible in this most impossible of worlds."