IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8164, 22 June 1906, Page 3

IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

Sir Hiram, Maxim, inventor of *the Maxim gun has given some very interesting views to the world regarding tae importance of speed. Explaining that speed das been the chief factor in progress-speed of action,' movement and intercommunion —he feels sure that science in.the 'next quarter of a oentury will be devoted chiefly to inureasing this in all possible .directions. First of -all man had. to depend on hia own members to carry him far or near, and then instinct directed him to ••enslave" an animal of more capa : • city, and naturally be seiucted the horse. For most of the years that the world baa lived the horse has served . bis needs, and so when we ' look : back over bistorj we see -enough to enable us to take the alow process of civilisation and the faulty means of locomotion and ' bracket them together. The horse i ashore and the sailing ship at sea first assisted civilization, and I then retarded it for eventually man's advance in other directions quite out- : stripped their capabilities. The world was not bo big as formerly when men made ships to Bail ail round it, but it still was a very big world, an acquaintance with even a part of wbiob was a rare ■ and precious luxury. The locomotive.engine at onae served to.shrink i the land and the steamboat to shrink the sea, so that as they developed man was given a truer dominion of bis heritage, becoming great to the exact extent that the globe became little. Every mile saved in thiß way has been as a mile gained and ao much time arrested, and where electricity has served, as. in the cable and telegraph the saving and gain has been so tremendous as to cause the earth to shrink to invisible proportions. Methuselah . lived fourteen times as long as man lives now, and yet using the word "live" in the sense of acoomplish- . ment he died, by comparison, a mere infant. Had ..he travelled night and day, and conducted business by every known facility of the time the volume of bis aooomDlisbment would still' not 'weigh in the scale with the possible accomplishment of a life to day. Speed has enabled modern man to squeeze into his'life years the essence of all - the years of ten centuries of that; far away time, and bringing the comparison-nearer has enabled him to far outlive in experience and accomplishment the man 'of three hundred years ago, a oentury atjo - and even of sixty years ago. And as Sir Hiram Maxim says speed hHS not,done all its work yet,, with the result that the future man may .outdistance the present one in this way as much as the latter now out-dis-tances the man of say the sixteenth - oentury. '