The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1913-08-22
HIsToRY,s GREATEST BATTLE.

A battle between a mastodon and a
horde of cavemeni Conceive the pic
ture if you can, writes Herbert Kauf-
man in Woman's World for Septem Der
the Titanic brute towering above
the human insects-tusks slashing i'm
potently-the hairy little savages
. creeping from rock to rock, hurting
their poisoned stone-head spears
here an OVERLOAD hunter suddenly
caught beneath a foot as big as a
Saratoga trunk which brushes like d
trip-hammer-the querulouS trumpet
ing of the pachyderm irritated into in
sane fury-the incoherent mouthings
of his pigmy tormentors-what a con-
test.
The scroll of the years is rolled back
a hundred hundred centuries. On the
canvas of imagination are limned our
distant sires, prognathous-jawed thick
chested, muscle-bound, their huge
torsos overlapping legs that seem like
pipe-stems by the contrast
We are back to the beginning of
things; back in the pre-dawn of
civilization when beasts were gentler
than humans and the code of the car
nivora was the gentlest law of the uni
verse. A terrible scene-an epic of
the hunter.
But know of a more dramatic fight
than this, more tragic than that in the
b1ood-soaked pass of Thermopylae or
Islam Shah's assault upon Delhi.
The brush of no Meissonier or Lady
Butler ever portrayed so enormous a
theme.
Dismiss from your mind the charge
of the Scotch Grays; forget the thin
red line at Balaklava;" erase the mem
ory of Winkelreid's last stand in the
Alpine highways.
The painter of my picture is the sun,
and the canvas is a moving picture
reel. We sit in a darkened room. ST.
lently we await the path of light from
the balcony behind us. There is
sputter and whirr, and suddenly upon
the sheet ahead, queer forms begin to
move, strange, disc-shaped, transpar-
ent, moving with incredible swiftness.
After a while we perceive that it is not
an animated geometrical design from
the morbid brain of a raving cubist,
but a reality-the uncanny strife be-
tween the forces of virtue and evil
the ancient grudge of the good and
the bad angels
A miracle is in our eyes. We are
actually beholding the battle which
began when life first pulsed in Adams
veins 1t is the war between health
and disease-the battle for control of
the blood-leucocyte against phago-
cyte.
Science has combined the micro
scope and the motion camera, and the
day is not far distant when few PEN
MES will be "open sesame" to revela-
tions beyond purchase ten years ago.
Disease, that most versatile of pro-
team artists, will be shortly starred in
his thousands of roles.
What the most eminent pathologists
of the nineteenth century could never
learn, the layman may now witness as
n mere episode in a dimes worth of
entertainment
To me there is no greater augury
of hope for sanity and clean living
and morality than these triumphs of
scientific motion photography. Dis
ease can only flourish where ignor-
ance is dormant. The average man be-
lieves only what he can behold. The
indefinite and the invisible seldom ap-
pail him. With the majority of us,
out of sight means out of mind. But
when we are brought face to face with
the indubitable proof of forces within
ourselves which destroy character and
feed upon vitality; when we know by
the evidence of our own vision that
physical fouIness breeds the servants
of death; when our memory is filed |
with actual pictures of bacilli and
microbes devastating our blood
when the operations of digestion are
in plain sight and we can observe and |
measure the difficulties with which |
our stomachs must deal-when we
learn at first hand, how we store |
poisons within our systems-when we
witness the foul pests which are nur-
tured upon these vile secretions-
when we cannot escape the realization
that it is our own follies and indul- |
gences and passions that induce the |
miseries from which we suffer a great |
err era than the Golden Age will des- |
cend upon the earth.