Myles Away From Dublin Part 4

Is that enough? Do I have to add that another is Homer? Horace I claim as an acquaintance. Father Peter O'Leary was a cousin on the mother's side, and Rabelais was supposed to have been a great-great-great-great uncle.

Some Other Friends My science of friends.h.i.+p is capable of unlimited expansion. Any second-hand bookshop is all I need to make still another new friend. Even my wife occasionally brings home a new pal in her handbag, though her a.s.sociates are not necessarily mine. Indeed, I find it hard to get on with some of them, being uneasy in their presence and not understanding wholly the English that they talk. I cannot make head or tail of Edgar Wallace, for example, and Ethel M. Dell is to me an utter mystery. Trollope? Yes, he lives nearby and we exchange coldish nods. Believe it or not, one of my choicest b.u.t.ties is Alexander Pope. The only man I cannot stick at all is Oliver Goldsmith. I cannot quite understand my dislike here. Goldsmith was a decent man and did his best to write good English but I have absolutely failed to get fond of him. Plain hatred is what I entertain for Sir Samuel Ferguson. His Lays of the Gael and Gall is a disgusting anthology, a monument of home-made decay. A terrible rage boils up within me if anybody within my hearing mentions Wordsworth. I cannot comprehend why that man was ever called into existence. I take the easy course of a.s.suming he is an absurdity and possibly never lived at all, being invented by some person with an imagination on the macabre side. It is inconceivable that he had a mother, for all women are intrinsically virtuous.

And will your heart fail, good reader, if I mention Sir Walter Scott? I read his autobiography once upon a time and am not yet the better of that experience. He explained to me in quite unnecessary detail that he had once accidentally managed to owe another person 100,000, and then proceeded to pay this sum off. He succeeded but did not eat much food for many years. In this interval he wrote the terrifying Waverley Novels, causing several persons who never hurt him to incur the disease known as dementia.

Recently I pa.s.sed by a book-shop in Na.s.sau Street Dublin, except I didn't pa.s.s by. Unhappily, I paused. The d.a.m.ned sixpenny barrow lured me. I am fatally fond of big thick, fat books. They seem great value, irrespective of content.

Weighty Volume At this sixpenny barrow I bought the autobiography, in two volumes, of Henry Taylor. When I got the books home, I weighed them on my wife's balance in the kitchen and they weigh four and a quarter pounds. I have never heard of Henry Taylor but the books were published in 1885 by Longmans, Green and Co. I have not read Mr Taylor's account of himself but a furtive glance at one volume gives me the suspicion that this man was a poet, or thought he was. A frontispiece portrait shows him looking very old and sporting an enormous white wig. Why did he waste so much valuable time growing so very old and writing that poetry that n.o.body nowadays reads and probably never read?

The subt.i.tle of the first volume intrigues me. Just this modest phrase 'Vol. I: 18001844'. Forty-four years of abject futility, squeezed into one volume, weighing over two pounds avoirdupois.

Thoughts on the yoke A question the reader may ask is 'What do you mean by "the yoke"?' Let us go to the dictionary for the answer.

'YOKE from a root (Latin jungo, I join) meaning to join. A part of the gear or tackle of draught animals, particularly oxen, pa.s.sing across their necks; a pair of draught animals yoked together; something resembling a yoke in form or use; a frame to fit the neck and shoulders of a person for carrying pails or the like; fig. servitude, slavery.'

The early motor car was known as 'the horseless carriage' and that is why the car came to be known, at least in Ireland, as the yoke. My thoughts on the yoke this week arose from a conversation I had with an intelligent and educated man, himself a yoke-owner, who flabbergasted me by saying that the motor car had been invented by Henry Ford. It is an astonis.h.i.+ng fact that most car-owners are nearly totally ignorant about their cars a fact, alas, which some ruffianly garage owners turn to good account. I have heard of one such man who sold a charming lady who drove up in a Volkswagen (which is air-cooled) a tin of anti-freeze fluid. One other new VW owner, asked by a friend how the car was going, said it was going very well. 'Don't mention this to a soul,' he added, 'but I have made a discovery. There is no engine in it!'

How It Began The first 'horseless carriage' was not the motor car as we know it. A Frenchman named Cugot built about 1771 road carriages operated by steam. In the years which followed, many others throughout the world made their own steam cars. But from 1831 the English parliament decided that those vehicles were unpleasant and dangerous and enacted the notorious Red Flag laws which compelled anybody driving a steam road carriage to be preceded by a man carrying a red flag by day or a red lantern by night. Other crippling disabilities such as penal tolls exacted by highway authorities practically killed the steam car in Britain, and the law establis.h.i.+ng the spectre with the red flag was not repealed until 1896.

But in Germany and France the possibilities of the internal combustion engine were under study. About 1885 Gottlieb Daimler in Germany patented his high-speed internal combustion engine, and is commonly credited with being the inventor of the motor car, fundamentally as we know it. But there is some dispute here. Karl Benz and Siegfried Marcus are credited with having built comparable vehicles about the same time. The truth is that the motor car was not invented by any individual but was the result of the talent of many men over a long s.p.a.ce of time.

Ford's first car appeared in 1893; by 1940 the company had produced more than 28,000,000 cars. His great achievement was to invent ma.s.s production on the a.s.sembly-line system, and he deserves a special article to himself; he was a crank who made crankshafts.

Its Effect on People The motor car, in its extreme youth, was commonly regarded with naked hostility; it frightened horses and even frightened people because in its early days its gear system was such that when it encountered a steep hill, it had to ascend it backwards. At best, enlightened people regarded it as an ingenious toy. It is curious that the primitive cars were regarded by many as a means of sport and racing, not until much later to be accepted as a means of fast, everyday transport for man and goods.

Its coming entailed, at least in what are called civilised communities, a real and spectacular revolution, the more so when one remembers that the aeroplane was the son of the motor car. And it was not merely a mechanical revolution. The car had a formidable social impact. One of the early objections to it was that it raised blinding clouds of dust in dry weather. The thoroughfares of long ago were not roads at all in the present sense. The car created the modern road. It enabled people to live away from slums and city congestion and brought into being whole new communities.

A social change? Some people think that the motor car is, possibly next to gunpowder, the greatest curse which has ever descended on mankind. They hold that a yoke is as directly related to strong liquor as is a gla.s.s and that all car drivers are nearly always stotious. That is great exaggeration but it is true that death and injury attributable to the yoke, while reducible with care on everybody's part, is inevitable. Danger is implicit in any sort of movement. In London resides a valuable body known as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Where has it been statistically established that most accidents, fatal and otherwise, happen?

In the home. The sad fact is that we are mortal and are safe nowhere. Even if the extreme step of bringing back the man with the red flag were taken, I'm sure there would be a fatal accident. The yoke following him would run him down and kill him.

The Model T man Some weeks ago I promised to write something about Henry Ford (18631947), if only because I have been reading about him recently. Isn't it hard to believe that he was alive as late as 1947?

He was an extraordinary man. He knew more, at least in his earlier days, about litigation than he did about automobiles. He had also a formidable grasp of the law governing patent rights in his time, and made this known several times by firing lawyers who told him he was wrong.

A recital here of his monstrous litigations would be not only dull but probably incomprehensible. To put it briefly, Ford was an eccentric man who had nonetheless many sound ideas, not a few of them since adopted universally. He was, to use a cliche, ahead of his time and he naturally suffered from it. A life-span of 84 need dismay no man. He seemed as indestructible as his famous Model T.

His Beginnings The deep thinking on large-scale industrial problems which were to characterise Ford's life had indeed simple beginnings. Though born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan, his parents had emigrated from Cork in 1847. That was one of the famine years, and the trip must have been a painful and squalid pa.s.sage in a windjammer, with no hint that it would conclude in the ma.s.s manufacture of the 'flivver'. Yet that is what did happen. Tradition has it that the Ford factory in Cork, originally intended for the manufacture of agricultural tractors, was founded by Ford in memory of his parents. Very likely that is true. The iron structure of Ford's mind did not exclude sentiment.

Yet his parents do not seem to have been true Irish people at all, not that it matters when one considers his life-work. His mother's name was Mary Litogot and, born in the US, had Dutch parents herself. William Ford, the father, was probably of English extraction. The mother died when Henry was 12, and William decided that his son should be a farmer. His main interest as a youngster was in mechanics, taking asunder at the age of 13 a watch and then correctly rea.s.sembling it. His main tool was a knitting needle, flattened at the point to a very keen blade. Although compelled to do farm work by day and no excuse taken, Ford spent many hours at night mending watches and thus sustaining his interest in machines, besides quietly making some money.

Just when and how did he go into the motor business? This is not certain, but his first vehicle was a farm tractor worked by a steam engine which was, in fact, far too heavy for the job. His father, to put a stop to this nonsense, offered Henry a 40 acre farm, much of it wooded. Henry built a saw mill worked by steam, cut the trees and sold lumber. About 1888, taking advantage of his comparative independence, he got a job with the Detroit Edison Company as an engineer and it was about this time that he began to experiment with the petrol engine, somewhat as we know it today. He formed the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with a capital of 100,000 dollars and the first cars he made and sold, designed solely for speed, won every race for which they were entered. That is one of the ironies of the story. The origin of motoring rests, not on universal transportation but on racing.

What Conclusion?

What is one to make of the whole story? It is not easy to say, at least by those who have a poor grasp of staggering figures. Ford ignored trade unions but paid a far higher rate than the minimum they prescribed. He refused to enter into any agreements or conventions with other motor-makers. As his organisation developed, he did not see why he should pay merchants or middlemen for timber; so he bought, maintained and developed his own forests. He equally disdained s.h.i.+pping companies and soon had his own vessels for transportation of his cars overseas. Later he was to realise that this transportation was in itself wasteful and that his cars should be made or a.s.sembled at various spots throughout the world. In the United States alone he founded 34 a.s.sembly plants and now Ford factories exist in many parts of the world, manned almost wholly by natives.

Talking of Dr Diesel Having written last week about Henry Ford and his famous Model T, I feel I should say something this week about the diesel engine. The theme is gruesomely topical, for the Eichmann trial has revealed that one of the 'quick and easy' methods of murdering Jews, locked in a road truck, was to divert the exhaust gas of its diesel engine into it. The irony of that sort of tragic killing lies in the fact that the inventor of the diesel engine was a German.

Some of the books say he wasn't, for he was born in Paris in 1858. But both his parents were German, and nearly all his education took place in Munich. A technical paper he published, in English named The Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Motor led to the making of the first engine by Rudolf Diesel, and to the diffusion of the principle he discovered today throughout the world. The engine was first publicly shown in Munich in 1898, and in the same year an American (?) named Busch paid Diesel one million gold marks for the rights of US manufacture. The soundness of his idea was self-evident.

Rudolf Diesel's life (18581913) was ended in a way not to be expected in the regime of a skilled and original engineer. On the night of September 2930, he fell off the Antwerp-Harwich steamer and was drowned.

The Diesel Principle Most of us have a fair idea of how the petrol engine works. A mixture in the form of gas prepared in the carburettor in the air-fuel ratio of 14.5:1 is introduced to the cylinders and exploded by means of sparking plugs, which are activated by an intricate electrical system.

Diesel knew from miscellaneous experience that compression itself meant the spectacular generation of heat and the principle of his engine is based on the theory that the sparking plug is not necessary to achieve combustion. In his cylinder, ordinary air is compressed to about 500 lb per square inch, which raises its temperature to 1000 F. This has been defined as red-hot air, and into it is injected a spray of atomised oil. There is an instant explosion. The event is spontaneous, and the machine begins to work.

Yet the diesel engine has certain inherent delicacies. In this country the steam engine, having served faithfully for a century, is steadily being ousted by diesel locomotives, and never have traction breakdowns been so frequent. The steam engine has always been a notoriously inefficient machine, a great amount of its energy being spent on moving itself; it has been a sort of diabolical creature, breathing fire, shaking the earth and causing enormous uproar. But its sheer brute-strength made it the pivot of a whole era, just as Henry Ford's Model T was later to do.

Is Petrol Obsolete?

Nowadays several makes of car are offered with, at the option of the purchaser, petrol or diesel engines. Some people think petrol is on the way out, for the cost of unearthing, transporting and refining it is vastly higher than the crude stuff a diesel engine uses. This is indeed a half-truth. The petrol engine is far more versatile than the diesel, universally understood and capable of being serviced anywhere. On the other hand, the diesel is more suitable and economic for really heavy work such as driving s.h.i.+ps, moving earth, powering military tanks, or driving the machinery of great factories.

Man has not yet found the ideal method suitable for all purposes though he seems to have decided that steam will no longer do.

There are still in the far corners of Ireland the quiet man who thinks he found the true answer when he was a little boy, and still believes in that answer. It does not entail crankshaft, injectors or plugs. You just get a simple cart and yoke a donkey into it.

The folly of the answer game I am sure many readers share my horror of the quiz. It is a useless and infuriating abomination, and it is infernally ubiquitous. One can scarcely take up any magazine or newspaper (The Nationalist and Leinster Times honourably excepted) without encountering it in one form or another. Versions of it occur on the cinema screen. Turning on the radio is a matter of deadly risk. When I personally do so, I am almost certain to hear the voice of my friend, Joe Linnane.

'Now, Number One. This is a six-mark question. How much are two and two? If you add two and two together, what do you get?'

(Pause).

'Em ... five.'

'No. Hard luck, Number One. The correct answer is four.'

(This last, as an absolute statement, is in fact wrong. There are fluids, also gases, which when combined equally in two-part quant.i.ties, do not achieve a total of 4 but sometimes as low as 3 because the combination brings about a change in the overall molecular structure.) Crosswords, the yo-yo and whistling in the bus are all bad. But the quiz is worst of all.

Is It Good For You?

The firm of Guinness is world-renowned, chiefly for the gift of making good stout and producing sundry kindred brews. Quite recently they have seemed to have gone wild and produced a ma.s.sive book of 280 large pages. A treatise on brewing? Not at all, but the answers to quiz questions on every subject under the sun, a unique compendium of useless knowlege. There is scarcely any mention of Guinness itself except an oblique one when, having disclosed that the largest brewery in the world is in the US, it adds that the largest in Europe is none other than Arthur Guinness, Son and Company Ltd.

Which is the largest airline in the world TWA or Pan-American? Neither. It is the Russian airline 'Aeroflot', which operates 1,006 aircraft.

Which distinguished singer earned most in the course of his career? Caruso, of course. No, no, you are wrong. It was our own John MacCormack, who piled up a total of 1,400,000.

Still talking of music, this book can be funny, though the editors swear every word they print is true. It is useless asking the reader where and when was the vastest orchestra ever a.s.sembled, what sort were the instruments and how many of them were there. The respective answers are Trondheim, Norway, August, 1958; bra.s.s 12,600. Is this true? I cannot help doubting it, for I was in this country in 1958 and in my health and I did not hear the recital.

A Few More Facts It is impossible to give the reader a true notion of this remarkable compendium but I will quote a few more facts entirely at random. The palm for prodigious literary output goes to an American, Eric Stanley Gardner, aged 70. He dictates up to 10,000 words a day and is usually engaged on seven novels simultaneously. What I personally admire here is not so much the output as the uncanny control which prevents a character in one book from accidentally straying into another and thus snarling up both books.

The highest spire in the world is that of the Protestant cathedral at Ulm, Germany; 528 feet. St Paul's in London was a mere 489 feet but was struck by lightning in 1561. (I did not know St Paul's existed then.) But when it comes to a question of ecclesiastical age, we need not bang our own heads. The Gallerus Oratorio near Kilmalkedar, Co. Kerry, reputedly dates from AD 550!

The heaviest beer-drinking country in the world is Belgium.

Between 1940 and 1955 a number of 'counter-revolutionaries' were executed in China. How many? At least 20 million.

The last public hanging in London was in 1868, the distinguished main actor being Michael Barrett, a Fenian.

The country with most psychiatrists (13,425) it's an easy guess the United States.

One more Guinness Does stating something as a fact make it true? That is a more complicated question than it sounds, for what begins as lie can in time become truth. When Hitler told the German people, for purposes of his own, that Germany's dearest friend was the Soviet Union, he was believed and Germans in general became very friendly with Russians. That both nations tried later on to exterminate each other is irrelevant. The mutual esteem, while it lasted, was genuine.

This week I return, as threatened, to the Guinness Book of Records. This book is full of extraordinary allegations, for the veracity of which no source or proof is given. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that this majestic firm should go out of its way to circulate a parcel of lies. We must take the material on trust, as we do the contents of newspapers.

The Mostest In the matter of printed books, the bestseller of this era was Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitch.e.l.l. It deals with the American Civil War and has become so well-known that it is casually referred to in many publications merely as GWTW. Twenty years ago I felt I must be stupid and illiterate for not having bought and read it. I bought a copy all right but in the course of four heroic attempts to read it I broke down. Frankly, I found it unreadable, badly written, dull.

Hollywood nearly strangled itself in an effort to make it the greatest film ever. Even the film I found dull, ridiculously elaborate and far too long. I do not doubt that the fault is in myself.

Turning to the Guinness Book, there is a statistic concerning the longest run of a play. The play in question opened in Los Angeles on July 6, 1933, and, playing one show a night, lasted until September 6, 1953. The t.i.tle of this play? The Drunkard.

The reader may well ask why it stopped at all after over twenty years. The answer is that it didn't. The play was made the subject of a musical adaptation called Wayward Way and this piece was played on alternate nights with the original until October 1959. When finally discontinued, The Drunkard had been played 9,477 times.

I feel there must be a moral buried here. For some people drink itself is a fascination but for a far greater number, all total abstainers, the subject of drink and drunkenness fascinates. No doubt The Drunkard is a burlesque and funny in its own right, like Ten Nights in a Bar-room as played in Dublin years ago by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company. All the same, I cannot think of any other theme that could stand up to the harrowing friction of a 26 years' run. No doubt the players themselves had to be changed, for one who was a pretty young lady at the start would have become a middle-aged matron by the end.

Other Strange Facts The heaviest bell in the world is known as the Tsar Kolokol, cast in Moscow in 1733. It weighs 193 tons and is not to be mentioned in the same breath as the heaviest in Britain, the Great Paul in St Paul's, London, a toy that weighs a mere 16 tons.

In the US, an outfit named Kraft Foods entered into a contract with the singer Perry Como (48) for a one-hour appearance daily on colour television. Including production expenses, the money involved was 8,928,000. This seems to prove we are all in the wrong country.

The largest store in the world is R.H. Macy of Broadway. I will not trouble the reader with details of the staggering daily sales beyond saying that it has 11,000 employees. The floor s.p.a.ce is 46.2 acres, and I do not find it feasible to work out how many times bigger this is than Croke Park.

Talking again of shops, what is the longest chain of chain-shops? In the US there is an enterprise known by the long-winded name of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company; they have 120,000 employees, 4,276 branches, and operate two laundries of their own for dealing with the workers' uniforms. Outside the four county boroughs, no town in Ireland has anything like the population of the GA & PT's staff. Maybe it is just as well.

The largest tractor in the world (naturally a product of the US) was exhibited in May last year. It weighs 50 tons.

This Guinness Book is getting under my nails. Very likely I will be back to it again next week.

As n.o.ble as our newspapers A newspaper is like the man: it behaves itself, does not print scandalous matter, achieves dignity, wors.h.i.+ps truth, and refrains from libel. Most of us would like to be men as n.o.ble as our newspapers.

A friend recently gave me a copy of the Evening News. Dublin people are mightily surprised that London, a town with a population approaching 9,000,000, has only two evening papers, whereas Dublin has three. It makes no difference. The contents are the same. Even the type-faces don't vary.

First Issue This copy of the Evening News, still going strong, was presented to readers on Tuesday, July 26, bearing the date 1881. It was a reproduction of the first issue of a publication that prospered. It is a curious thing to look at in 1961. Very different people from us must have read it. And they must have had better eyes.

It is not too easy to isolate what is different about it, apart from some obvious physical things. I should say that the main differences lay in editorial att.i.tude. The news was presented with a take-it-or-leave-it gesture. It didn't matter very much. Neither did the reader.

No Headlines Perhaps the most impressive fact about the publication was the absence of display type. There were no headlines. The death of a dog in Hammersmith got the same show as the suicide of the head of a ruling house in Europe. Ireland was never mentioned at all, but plenty of s.p.a.ce was given to cricket.

Absence of display type meant that births, marriages and deaths got mixed up with mattresses, honey, and goings-on in South Africa. In that year of 1881, it will be recalled, the Queen was on the throne. Mr Gladstone was performing in the House of Commons. It was the Age of Peace, at least for Britain. The great Empire was still there.

Yet that paper shows some curiosities. I don't mean that it announces its price as one halfpenny (as it does) but hints at a different social att.i.tude. Everything is mentioned in monotone, as if it did not matter very much. Generally, one feels that the Evening News of 1881 is very different from today's Daily Express. Is it better? It is not easy to answer that question. I would say it is more restful. It would be unlikely to give you a heart attack in bed in the morning.

Siberian Plague No occurrence, however catastrophic, rated a greater display than the upper case of the text, or just plain capital letters. Thus one read a heading such as Outbreak of Siberian Plague without being unduly disturbed. Another report was headed Punishment at Sea. Still another please remember the date was headed The Russian Imperial Family.

News reports are announced as 'Telegrams', thus paying tribute to the new invention, and there is an enormous, very heavy leading article about the Transvaal. There were no features, no glimpse of the common man.

Yet perhaps he did intrude a little bit.

One man inserted a notice saying that he was selling first quality salt. That was fair enough, and several other people were doing the same. But this man said that there was a reduction in price of 10 per cent for total abstainers.

I think I had better end here.

The world is right-handed I think I mentioned some weeks ago that I had smashed my right fore-arm. It may be that a person who expatiates on such an injury is to be likened to the lady who talks endlessly and minutely (for at least forty years, anyhow) about her operation, conferring excruciating boredom on her listeners and making them want to run away.

I don't think, however, that the two situations are identical. For instance, no operation lasts for several weeks and in practice, anybody who undergoes a serious operation can know nothing about it.

Twin Organs I may be permitted initially a few general observations. The human being is fitted out with certain twin organs such, for example, as the arms, legs, eyes, ears, kidneys, lungs. It is unprecedented for each of the twins to operate with equal efficiency.

Everybody has a master eye. How often does a companion say to us: 'Walk on this side of me. I'm deaf in the left ear.' Disease frequently appears in one lung and not in the other, and this is also true of the kidneys.

Ambidexterity, or the use of either hand with equal ease, is more a word than a fact. Even skilled and well-trained boxers do not have it. Biologists have often recommended that children should be meticulously trained in ambidexterity but since it is the left hemisphere of the brain which controls the motor apparatus of the right side of the body, other commentators have said that the equal development of the right hemisphere would cause speech impediment.

Got a Hiding In practice, what happened when we were all very young? Those of us who showed a clear tendency to use the left hand as the primary corporal tool got a severe hiding for our pains. All the same, there are many left-handed people in the world particularly, for some reason, cricketers. The 'normal' person's left hand and arm is almost quite useless except for a.s.sisting the right.

If, however, one closely observes a person who is well and truly left-handed, one soon notices that his right hand is by no means as useless as the 'normal' person's left. It has a real though diminished usefulness. I think I know why.

Are parents who sternly discourage a left-handed att.i.tude on the part of their children ignorant and eccentric people? I do not think so. They are really trying to save the child from a lifetime of inconvenience, and even situations of physical danger. The reason is that the whole world is organised on the basis that everybody is right-handed. That is why left-handed adults must put the right hand to some use, whether they like it or not, and attain gradually a certain proficiency in its use.

To put the fore-arm in plaster from the elbow, it is necessary to continue the iron dressing down to the knuckles in order to obtain anchorage at the seat of the thumb. That usually immobilises the whole hand and the fingers. I soon found what this meant.

Like most gents, to wash myself I used nothing more than water, soap and my two hands. Well, I could not wash myself. Preposterous licks with a left-handed cloth may have removed some of the more striking filth. But that was merely to confront me with another ordeal shaving.

Plain Impossible This was a very lengthy and terrifying business, with great blood losses, and a finished job that looked just awful. Then putting on a s.h.i.+rt, manipulating studs to fix a collar, and finally knotting a tie that was plain impossible.

Discarding all pride, I had to call in my consort, to discover, however, that she did not know how to knot a tie, though some lessons soon fixed that. And lacing shoes was another task beyond me.

Later, I found that a bus is designed for the right hand as to mounting it, dismounting and finding a seat. There was infinite danger in a bus trip. A meal which entailed use of a knife and fork was impossible. Even lighting and smoking a cigarette was perilous. I had to give up completely playing billiards, the violin and the piano. And typing with the left hand only is infinitely arduous.

Are you curious about all this, dear reader, or even incredulous? Why not find out? For a trifling cost, any chemist will put your own right arm, from elbow to knuckles, in pitiless plaster. Then heaven help you, and me too, if we manage to get mixed up in a rough house.

What's funny?

That question is serious. Just what makes us laugh? I once asked a celebrated physician what a sneeze was. He began giving me a lengthy piece of rawmaish about the windpipe, the throat, the larynx and the lungs. I cut him short.

'Doctor,' I said, 'you are describing the location of the sneeze. I asked you about the event itself.'

After a pause, he said: 'A sneeze is a paroxysm, and quite harmless.'

'A paroxysm? I see. If it's quite harmless, why does everybody in Ireland say "Bless you" when a person sneezes?'

'Don't know. It's an ancient custom, probably pagan.'

Well, what's a laugh? Is it another style of paroxysm? Let us immediately note one important distinction between the sneeze and the laugh. Human beings and animals sneeze but animals don't laugh. Maybe that's why we insist on regarding them as very thoughtful and infinitely wise. 'My slippers are missing again, as usual. That dog knows where they are. If only he could talk, he'd tell me.'

The number of things included under the head of HUMOUR is uncountable. Humour can be visual, or something written or spoken. If you have a man who has a certain arrogance of manner and who is impeccably dressed, it is very funny to pour a bucket of dirty water over him, preferably from an upstair's window. Should we not pity a person subjected to such a plight? No, indeed. We roar laughing.

Looking Back The year 1854 did not occur yesterday. I have been looking over a bound volume of a weekly named The London Journal under that date, and it seems far further away than a mere 107 years. It seems concerned with events on another planet, and the drawings which adorn it (woodcuts) look slightly unearthly. It announces itself to be a 'weekly record of literature, science and art'. I have not investigated that claim, and for a peculiar reason: I found the paper nearly impossible to read. I do not wear gla.s.ses and regard my sight as 'normal', but the print is unbelievably small. This means that the plain people had far better eyesight a century ago.

But why do I disinter this publication in the year of grace, 1961? Because it contains a funny column under the stupidly c.u.mbrous t.i.tle of FACETIAE. Is the funny stuff funny? Let the reader judge. I present samples, taken absolutely at random.