14 JANUARY 1928, Page 19

An exposition of Relativity without mathematics is an ambitious project

which has often been attempted before, but we feel that Professor Rice succeeds where others have failed largely because he clears the ground thoroughly in his first five chapters and his interesting introduction. To us to-day it may be as difficult to remodel our theories of absolute space and time and revise our ideas of Euclidian geometry as it was to the men of Galileo's day to envisage the revolution of the earth. But it can and must be done and probably presents less difficulty to the flexible minds of the young than it does to their elders. The children of 2000 A.D. may be prattling in the nursery about Michelson, Lorentz, undulatory hypotheses and frames of reference ; if so they will be indebted in part to this excellent little treatise, which is also in Benn's Sixpenny Series. * a * *