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The Huron Expositor, 1930-12-05, Page 3IGT4,714*04er 4oesi t, of cLoti}rse• f►nd eaSrny,. *NI*. is<. in life'.' nowadays whjeh. she duos geteliefhiell . She tree sures and looks :forward ,t9sr;ia that -which comes every weekheer her little graxid'daughter" talks to hag as the long dh'stanee telephone. he words which no letter can equal area 4412 that you, grandma ?'i' A TRIFLE DAZED "Why the black eye, old moan?" a 'm toriously much -married man was asked by a friend. "Well, you see," said the black-eyed one, "I came home rather unsteady the other night and thought I'd read •a little before going to bed. My "wife came down and caught me, and there was some very pronounced trouble" "What were you reading?" "By ill -luck I'd chosen the chess board!" BREEDING FANCY PIGEONS IS A CHARMING HOBBY Two or three years ago Hon. Mir. Motherwell, then Minister of Agricul- ture, visited' the Royal Winter •Fair and arranged matters so that the last hour should be spent with the poul- try, and particularly the utility poul- try which figure so importantly in -agricultural statistics. To reach the pens, he had looked at them with some slight displeasure and made a re- mark to the effect that he could not quite see the point of any part of a federal grant being distributed emong these pets and playthings. • So be fell into conversation•.wiht the superin- tendent of this section who proceeded to explain to him some of the varie- ties of fancy pigeon and their desir- able points. He showed him some parlor tumblers which have been bred for many years to the end that they are unable to fly, but when agi- tated, simply throw somersaults back- wards along the floor, 'sometimes for a distance of 30 er 40 feet. Mr. Moth- erwell became engrossed with these extraordinary little acrobats, and when at last he looked at his watch lie found he had no time to inspect that backbone of agriculture, the util- ity hen. Others have bad similar experience and from such casual and accidental encounters there often emerges the pigeon fancier, who is generally con- sidered to be subnormal mentally. Nevertheless, 'the breeding and ex- hibiting of fancy pigeons form the bobby of hundreds 'of Canadians who seem to be law-abiding, respectable and in other respects normal citi- zens. The Royal Winter Fair, com- ing at a time of year when the birds have completed their moult, which., incidentally, is a yearly process, sees 'them in their best new plumage, and thus attracts some of the finest speci- mens from the United States as well as from the lofts of Canadian breed- ers. We think that few people who pause to glance at the pigeons can fail to be struck by their beauty and grace, even though it is to be admit- ted that same are mere monstrosities, with no more essential and obvious charm than a toadstool. But among those who would find nothing to ad- mire in such a bird as a barb or run might admit the charm of the nomen- clature of the pigeon tribe. Atten- tion to this point, which had never previously occurred to us, was drawn a short time ago by The Drifter in The Nation. Lovingly he recited some of the names: Damascenes, La - horses, Florentines, Helmets, Hya- cinths, Nuns, Porcelains, Priests, Jac- obins and Archangels. 'We might add to the inusieal list, Scandaroons, Mon- daines, Dragoons, ISatinettes, Turb- iteens, ,Blondinettes and Fantails. it is believed that all 'varieties of fancy pigeons have a common ances- tor in the blue rock. One breed may be crossed with any other and no evi- dence of sterility occur. Oecasion'ally breeds are thus crossed to establish in one of them a feature which the other possesses. But 99 per cent. of all pigeons are kept pure and undefil- ed while the breeders strive for the elusive standard of perfection which has never yet been reached and nev- er will. The truth is that the perfect pigeon has never been: grroduced, and this, oddly enough, provides the chief fascination of the art and! sort of breeding them. 'When an existing standard has been almost approached and it seems likely that in the next year or two it wild .be attained, the fanciers of the particular breed get together and change it. They raise the bars, so to speak, and with in- creasing enthusiasm set out for the 'Quite Impossible It. But no stand- ard yet devised ever succeeded in ex- pressing to the real breeder a full description' of what he wants to . find in a bird. The mysterious thing call- ed by the varying names of type, quality and character is something visible to the true fancier's eye but hardly to be communicated by any such clumsy means of expression as pen or brush. Whine the quality and consequent- ly the value of pigeons in Canada has steadily increased and continues to do so, it is doubtful if there are as many breeders as there • were 30 years ago. Most of us can remember the time when behind almost every house was a barn' or shed and in this build- ing, if there was a boy in the family, there were pigeons, bantams, rabbits or guinea pigs. Barns and sheds have vanished from the city to a great ex- tent and with them have vanished their former occupants. Something liars been lost here, and something valuable. Mm. Wilson of the Humane "society they other day quoted a lead- ing American criminologistas saying 'that Tees than one and a quarter per 'cent. of all eriminle elver had a pet of any sort. Vile do not doubt the accuracy of 'this but candor compels us to say that a searrih of our memory dredge's Up a precious young seoundrel, since 'Barged no doubt, who 'appears in Dom - ."bey. and San, and that the trapping of stray .pigeons wag big chief delight, We nista add that it i:�s not infhte- quenr*ly the ease that it is by the trap- pitg of .stray pions was his chief delight + e ilat bdd that! ft is totelgt'tennty �e rise that it is ty t '4001Aritsof" otrb , `gbo s that t1L6 4,1* nt lfset�d'ines forittred the) often h,14� ws nit � ardent fancierr, y enoug" t4 °4#oi wuthout sonie of tete cornf is of life,° .i tbereby"he ca'n,add' to',his t}taelc of pigeons . It is this lova of trhe birds that natures and directs the skill shown( in their breeding. ePseeeewe UNIVERSE DESIGNED: BY A PURE MATHEMATICIAN Guesses at the riddle of eeistence are generally interesting if not al- ways clear or instructive, and if we; refex to a new one it is without any intention of stirring up again the cid battle between science . and religion. Sir James Jeans., secretary of the Royal Society, former Oam'bridge mathematician and astronomer, is of sufficient importance to warrant some attention to what he says on the sub- ject, although the title of his recent Rede lecture at that institution, "The Mysterious Universe," leaves the im- pression that he is still doubtful. But apparently there was no doubt in the mind of the Daily Empress which bold- ly declares: "A sensational theory of the origin of the universe which brings the most modern discoveries of science into harmony with Plato and the first 'chapter of Genesis was out- recently by Sir James Jeans, the fam- ous Cambridge scientist, when he de- livered the Rede lecture in the Sen- ate enate House." Longer and less sprightly reports of the address were not quite so posi- tive. The general recognition that we were not yet in contact with ulti- mate reality was, Sir James argued, the outstanding feature of the 20th century .physics. To speak in terms of Plato's well known simile we are still imprisoned• in our cave, with our backs to the fight, And can only watch the shadows on the wall. At present the only task immediately before sci- ence is to study these shadows and what we are finding, in a wholes tor- rent of surprising new knowledge, is that the way which explains them more fully, more clearly and more naturally than any other is the math- ematical way, the explanation in terms of mathematical concepts. Our earth is so innfinitesimial in compar- ison with the whole universe that it is all too probable that any meaning that the universe as a whole may have would entirely transcend our terrestrial experience and so be tot- ally unintelligible to us. But it was not impossible that some of the sha- dows might suggest objects and op- erations. Indeed, nature seemed very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics as they had been formu- lated in the studies of the mathema- ticians. It is difficult to discuss the nature of the reality behind the sha- dows. We have bo extraneous stan- dards against which to compare them. For this reason it is profitable to borrow Locke's phrase that the "real essence of substances" is forever un- knowable. We can only progress by discussing the laws which govern the changes of substances and so produce the phenomena of the external world. And a scientific study df the action of these laws suggests a conclusion which may be summed up, though crudely and quite inadequately: "The universe does not appear to work, as at one time thought on anthropomor- phic lines nor, as was recently though, on mechanical lines; it ra- ther works on purely mathematical lines. In brief the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician." At this point the Times report halts and passes on to other features, but editorially that paper says: "Now we are bidden by Sir James Jeans to look upon God as the supreme thinker and one more- over whose thinking is done in terms of mathematics.i° The conception is not new for Robert Boyle thought mathematics the alphabet in which God wrote the world and Sir Thomas Browne likened God to a skilful geo- metrician. Centuries before either of them, "God goeme'trizes" was quot- ed by 'Plutarch as a traditional sen- tence used by Plato. Perhaps we are not in such deep water when we turn to man's insigni- ficance. A few stars, Sir James said, were known which were hardly big- ger than the earth but the majority were so large that hundreds of thou- sands of earths could be packed in- side each and leave room to spare; here and there we come upon stars large enough to contain millions of millions of earths. The total num- ber of stars in the universe was prob- ably something like the total number of grains of sand on all the seashores of the world. Life could exist only inside a narrow zone which surround- ed each star at a very definite dist- ance. 'Outside these zones life would be frozen; inside it would be shrivel- led up. At a rough computation these zones within which life was possible, all added together, consti- tuted less than a thousand million millionth part of the whole of space. And even inside them life must be of a very rare occurrence for it was so unusual an accident for any suns to throw off planets as our own sun had done that probably only about one star in 100,000 had a planet re- volving around it in the small zone in which life was possible. Just for this reason, said Sir James, it seems incredibl'e that the universe could have been designed 'primarily to produce life like our own; had it been s.o, surely we might harve expected to find a better proportion between the mag- nitude of the mechanism and t h e amount of the product. At first glance at least life seems to be an utterly umimportaii't by-pro- duct; we living beings are somehow off the main line, and this impression is only strengthened when. we attempt to pass from bur original to an un- derstanding of the purpose of our ex- istence xistence or to foresee the destiny which fate has in store( for our race: Just as Tantalus standing in a lake so deep that he only just escaped drowning, was yet destined to die of thirst so it ie the tragedy of our rade that it is pnolbably destined to die of cold se h le the greater part of the universe still remains too hot for life to obtain a footling. (Sir James came to the rpese simistic conclusion that it mattered little` by what particular roadthe final state was reaclhed; all roads tt*er& said 'be lead to Rosati and the end of the -3e1^ squid nab be other than universal death. WE EMPHASIZE BIG VARIETY 45. 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S3.25 to $3.75 Linen Cloths ..$2.25 to $4.00 Rayon Bed Spreads $3.75 FOR GIRLS Sweaters $3.75 FOR MEN Gloves $3.50 Shirts $3.50 Pyjamas ..... $3.50 Sweaters $3.50 Felt Hats ..... , .$3.50 Underwear $3.50 Mufflers $3.50 SPECIAL SHOWING OF WOMEN'S COATS For those who would give a Christmas present De Luxe to wife, mother, daughter or sister, we have a very spec- ially priced showing of the newest Coats, beautifully fur trimmed, in the very latest style garments. Price $16.75. STEWART BROS. Seaforth ALL GIFTS IN A FANCY CHRISTMAS BOX • p"p^' F.,.r...r .r "r, •.;,.r..er,;; r••;.; rtlitiaattrablatlattailiMrt .fr . r;;. ert Tor",` r. r ,:' P„ .. ..' •x. 1:4 1M x.. vT^Niall