THE "WISDOM" OF VAN LOON
Sir-I have read with amazement The Listener’s review of the wisdom of Van Loon. How ridiculous is the extravagant figure of the enduring rock! What an unfortunate exposition of the colossal ignorance of one who has essayed to instruct others! Under the conditions prevailing on this earth all rocks, all surface forms, are ephemeral. In but an instant of the eternity which Van Loon has tried to picture, his rock will have wilted away even if one allows for it the absurd dimensions postulated. His little bird after, let us say, its thousandth visit, will no longer find rock to whet its bill upon; nothing will remain but a mound, _soil-covered, forest-clad. The bird, considered not as an individual, but as a species or variety, may still be in the flower of its youth when the last trace of such a rock has vanished-the last trace even of the mound that. marks its site. The birds of that species will outlast, and whet their bills upon, an endless procession of new rock outcrops, each ephemeral as its predecessors, exposed by the hypogene and epigene machinery of the earth’s activity. If this is a representative sample of Van Loon’s wisecracks, it makes one tremble to think of the mentality of his host of -readers. Do they furnish a fair cross-section of the popu-
lation of a continent?-
C. A.
COTTON
(Wellington).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19440714.2.13.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 264, 14 July 1944, Page 7
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235THE "WISDOM" OF VAN LOON New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 264, 14 July 1944, Page 7
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