evening-an instant later; the spring was an alarming burst of living energy, the trees' budding and growth of leaves became a portent, like the bristling of hairs on the backs of vegetable cats. As his rate changed and he comprehended more and more in each pulse, the flowers faded and fell before he could think of plucking them, autumnal apples rotted in his grasp, day was a flash and night a wink of the eye, the two blending at last in a continuous half light.

After a time ordinary objects ceased to be distinguishable; then the seasons shared the fate of day and night. The lever was now nearly hard over, and the machine was reaching its limit. He was covering nearly a thousand of men's years with each of his own seconds.

The cinema effect was almost useless to him now; and he discarded this apparatus. Now followed what he had so eagerly awaited, something deducible in general but unpredictable in all particulars. As the required separate impacts of the ether waves had condensed, at his old, ordinary rate, to form the continuous sensation of light, so now the events of nature coalesced to give new objects, new kinds of sensation. Especially was this so with life: the repeated generations seemed to act like separate repeated waves of light, blending to give a picture of the species changing and evolving before his eyes.

Other experiences he could explain less well. He was conscious of strange sensations that he thought were probably associated with changes in energy distribution, in entropy; others which he seemed to perceive directly, by some form of telepathy, concerning the type of mental process occurring around him. It was all strange: but of one thing he was sure, that if only he could find a way of nourishing and maintaining himself in this new state, he would be able, as a child does in the first few years of life, to correlate his puzzling new sensations, and that when he had done this he would obtain a different and more direct view of reality than any he had ever obtained or thought of obtaining before.

As the individual light waves were summed to give light, as the microcosm of gas molecules was cancelled out to give a uniformity of pressure, so now the repetition of the years coalesced into what could be described as visible time, a sensation of cosmic rate; the

repeated pullulations of living things fused into something perceived as organic achievement: and the infinite variety of organisms, their conflicts and interactions, resolved itself, through the mediation of his sense organs and brain at their new rhythm, into a direct perception of life as a whole, an entity with a pressure on its environment, a single slowly evolving form, a motion and direction.

He put the lever to its limit: the rhythm of the cosmos altered again in relation to his own. He had an extraordinary sense of being on the verge of a revelation. The universe-that was the same; but what he experienced of it was totally different. He had immediate experience of the waxing and waning of suns, of the condensation of nebulæ, the slowing down and speeding up of evolutionary processes.

The curious, apparently telepathic sense which he had had of the mental side of existence was intensified. Through it, the world began to be perceived as a single Being, with all its parts in interaction. The shadowy lineaments of this Being were half seen by his mental vision-vast, colossal, slowly changing; but they appeared only to disappear again, like a picture in the fire. Strive as he might, he could not see the real likeness of this Being. Now it appeared benign; at its next dim reappearance there would be a feeling of capricious irresponsibility about it: at another instant it was cold, remote; once or twice terrible, impending over and filling everything with a black, demoniacal power which brought only horror with it. If he could but accelerate the machine! He wanted to know-to know whether this phantom was a reality, to know above all if it was a thing of evil or of good: and he could not know unless he could advance that last final step necessary to fuse the rhythm of separate events into the sensation of the single whole.

He sat straining all his faculties: the machine whirred and rocked: but in vain. And at last, feeling desperately hungry, for he had forgotten to take food with him, he gradually brought back the lever to its neutral-point.

And then there would have to be an ending. I think the newspaper man would take his opportunity to slink off into the

laboratory and get on the machine with the idea of making a scoop for his paper; and then he would put the lever in too violently, and be thrown backwards. His head hit the corner of a bench, and he remained stunned; but by evil chance, the handles of the machine still made connection with his body after the fall. The machine was making him adjust his rhythm to that of light; so that he was living at an appalling rate. He had gone into the laboratory late at night. Next morning they found him-dead: and dead of senile decay-grey haired, shriveled, atrophic.

I have spent so much time in frivolous discussion of rhythm and size and commonplaces that I have not pointed out another fundamental fact of biological relativity-to wit, that we are but parochial creatures endowed only with sense organs giving information about the agencies normally found in our little environment. Out of all the ether waves we are sensitive to an octave as light, and some few others as heat, X-rays and ultra-violet destroy us, but we know nothing about them until they begin to give us pain; while the low swell of Hertizan waves passes by and through us harmless and unheeded. Electrical sense, again, we have none.

Imagine what it would be for inhabitants of another planet, where changes in Hertzian waves were the central, pivoted changes in environment, where accordingly life had become sensitive to "wireless" and to nought else save perhaps touchimagine such beings broadcast upon the face of the Earth. With a little practice and ingenuity they would no doubt be able to decipher the messages floating through our atmoshpere, would feel the rhythms of the Black Hamitic Band transmitting Jazz to a million homes, and be able to follow, night by night, the soporific but benevolent fairy stories of Uncle Archibald. I wonder what they would make of it all. They would at intervals, of course, be bumping into things and people. But would touch and radio sense alone make our world intelligible? When we begin trying to quit our anthropocentry and discover what the world might be like if only we had other organs of body and mind for its assaying, we must flounder and bump in a not dissimilar fashion.

Even the few senses that we do possess are determined by our environment. Sweet things are pleasant to us: sugar is sweet: so is "sugar of lead"-lead acetate: sugar is nutritious, lead acetate a poison. The biologist will conclude, and with perfect reason, that if sugar was as rare as lead acetate in nature, lead acetate as common as sugar, we should then abominate and reject sweet things as emphatically as we now do filth or acids or over-hot liquids.

But I must pause, and find a moral for my tale; for all will agree that a moral has been so long out of fashion that it is now fast becoming fashionable again.

Every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say, knows William of Occam's Razor-that philosophical tool of admirable properties: Entia non multiplicanda propter necessitatem. We want another razor-a Relativist Razor; and with that we will carry out barbering operations worthy of another Shaving of Shagpat: we will shave the Absolute. The hoary Absolute, enormous and venerable, grey bearded and grey locked-he sits enthroned, wielding tremendous power, filling young minds with fear and awe. Up, barbers, and at him! Heat the water of your enthusiasm! Lather those disguising appurtenances. See the tufts collapse into the white foam, feel the hairy jungles melt away before your steel! And at the end, when the last hair falls, you will wipe away the lather, and look upon that face and see-ah, what indeed?

I will not be so banal as to attempt to describe that sight in detail. You will have seen it already in your mind's eye: "Or else" (to quote Mr. Belloc) "Or else you will not; I cannot be positive which." If not, you never will; if so, what need to waste more of the compositor's time? But of him who forges that razor, who arms those barbers, who gives them courage for their colossal task, of him shall a new Lucretius sing.

JULIAN S. HUXLEY.

SPRING FLOWERS BY THE MADELEINE

BY S. L. M. BARLOW

I went to buy Spring flowers

By the Madeleine,

And in the market-place

I thought, “God hides his face;
But we have sun and rain

And wind and April showers

As before the war."

The woman on her stool behind the rows

Of pots stuffed full of lilac blooms

Had seen, and let the bargaining go by,

Too many flowers bought to strew the battle tombs;
So she had changed, as I,

Showed me a field of poppies lying dead

And corn-flowers and golden grain

And forest ferns. When Spring comes once again
They will not wake and stir the loose earth-crust,-
Nor these dead forms that with them buried lie,—
But every Season find them so much dust
And leave them so.

O bitterness, to know

That you, who lie so scattered, crushed and torn
In your first dewy hours,

Could have been crushed in an embrace,

Could have been worn

O men and flowers!

I left the market-place,

Not heeding where I stepped.

I thought, "There are

As many flowers as before the war,"

And wept.