SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

STRIX

Just over seven years ago, on 5 May 1960, a turkey-farmer in East Anglia heard a super- sonic boom. Six days later a setting of 1,886 eggs produced a hatch of 1,160 chicks: this was a normal, satisfactory result. The next three hatches were as follows: (1) 19 May : 1,021 eggs-171 chicks.

(2) 23 May : 1,166 eggs-214 chicks.

(3) 30 May : 1,201 eggs-161 chicks.

After Hatch No 2 the farmer had a hunch that these disastrous results were attributable to the supersonic boom. He made a forecast that Hatch No 3 would be a failure: that No 4 might be 100 per cent better, because half the eggs would not have been laid at the time of the boom: and that Hatch No 5 would show a return to near-normality. He was right all along the line. Hatch No 3 was (see above) a complete failure; Hatch No 4 on 6 June showed 100 per cent improvement with 320 chicks out of 1,150 eggs; and a week later Hatch No 5 produced 638 out of 1,158.

Throughout the period exhaustive tests were carried out by a variety of experts on incubator equipment, food and anything else which might have contributed to the failures; all were nega- tive. Post-mortems (if that is the right word) on a number of the eggs showed that all the embryos had developed normally for between twenty and twenty-six days, the conclusion being that the damage done to the egg affected some part of it which the embryo did not need until a late stage in its growth.

All the experts were, naturally, highly scepti- cal of the farmer's theory that the boom was to blame; but in a report on Hatch No 2 the Houghton Poultry Research Station ad- mitted that 'the rupture of the blood-vessels in the allantois would be a likely result of the subjection of the eggs to severe changes in atmospheric pressure and if the fall in hatchability is confined' (as later results showed it was confined) `to those embryos which were being incubated at the time of the shock wave, in the absence of other causes of a sudden fall in hatchability, there would appear to be an association between the fall in hatchability and the occurrence of the shock wave.'

Hitherto I had always thought it rather hard luck on the human race that its female members were not oviparous; I see now that my chagrin was misplaced.

The farmer's insurance company, incident-

ally, met his claim under a clause dealing with damage by aircraft.

Faster, faster

'But what do you do,' my mother used to ask, 'with the time you save?' She had at long last, and with the gravest misgivings, agreed that her two eldest sons could have their own cars; and though neither vehicle was capable of going more than sixty miles an hour, she suspected us, quite rightly, of habitually driving much too fast. 'What do you do,' she per- sisted, 'with the time you save?' It was a difficult question to answer.

Anybody who asked it today would be branded a reactionary, for any reduction in the time spent in getting from A to B is regarded as axiomatically desirable. Very often this is the correct view. The commuter, whose home- ward journey an improved rail service (I know this sounds improbable) has shortened by twenty minutes, would not have the least diffi- culty in answering my mother's question; he has that much more time every day for playing with his children, beating his wife, watching television or doing whatever it is that he likes doing in his spare time.

But when it comes to air travel it seems to me that we have reached a point beyond which the benefits conferred by increased speed are marginal if not illusory. There is obviously some advantage in reducing the flight-time between London and New York from five hours to two hours; the Concord is expected to make a lot of money and confer a lot of prestige on its Anglo-French stable; and there is a certain plastic grandeur in the idea of 140 bemused travellers being carted across the Atlantic in less time than it takes to drive from Brighton to London on a Sunday evening.

But what, in hard fact, will those 140 do with the time they save? Since there is an efficient telephone service between London and New York, I find it exceptionally difficult to visualise any transaction in which the difference between five hours and two hours is going to play a significant role. I did actually rough out one story-line in which an American million- aire, a fine type of man, tardily apprised of his teenage daughter's intention to marry a titled British wastrel, got over just in time to forbid the banns. 'But for the Concord,' he told our reporter, 'I would have been too late.' But it seemed a little bit voulu, if you know what I

mean. Perhaps there are some of my readers who can do better?

This other Eden

'Vital minutes went by' (I read in the Daily Express last week) 'as doctors at North Staffs Royal Infirmary, Stoke-on-Trent, tried to identify it.' It' was a snake which had allegedly bitten a citizen aged twenty-three; its victim, 'weak with shock,' had brought the creature with him in a plastic bag. He was put in a 'specialist treatment department.' Zoo experts' were unable to identify the snake from a telephoned description, so a doctor set off on what the paper unaccountably failed to de- scribe as a 'mercy dash' to Chester Zoo, forty miles away. En route the serpent escaped from confinement, climbed up the steering column and went to ground behind the dashboard. The doctor stopped and sought the help of a farmer, who summoned a beekeeper, clad in protec- tive clothing and armed with a smoke gun. The snake was recaptured, the grim race re- sumed. At last they reached Chester Zoo, where the cause of all this brouhaha was instantly identified as a common grass-snake.

Perhaps because as a small boy I used to keep grass-snakes, this story, which appeared to be accurate in-essentials, fascinated me. Was there nobody at the North Staffs Royal In- firmary who knew what a grass-snake looks like? It is, after all, by reason of the yellow band on the back of its neck, particularly easy to identify and at close range cannot possibly be mistaken for an adder, which is venomous and which, apart from the rare and harmless smooth snake, is the only other snake found in these islands. Grass-snakes, moreover, have no fangs and cannot puncture the human skin; one would have thought that the staff of the 'specialist treatment department' could have established the fact that their patient, however strong his convictions to the contrary, had not been bitten by a snake or by anything else.

The whole episode is a quaint comment on our civilisation. On a day when the Ministry of Technology was terrorising large sections of the community with supersonic booms, the failure of a number of highly educated persons to recognise a grass-snake when they saw it caused needless alarm and an unnecessary diversion of effort. Granted that in the modern world there are more important things to study than elementary herpetology, it still remains a fact that among the largely illiterate subjects of Queen Elizabeth I no comparable display of cluelessness would have been possible.

Grave charge

The Public Schools Commission resumes its deliberations in Cambridge this week. It must by now have heard evidence from an enormous number of individuals and organisations, but there is one professional body whose forcefully recorded views it may have overlooked. In its opinion the public schools are a bad and dangerous institution: 'the whole system is cal- culated to rear men of inflexible will and ruthless energy who regard intellectual problems as a waste of time but know human nature and how to dominate other men in the most unscrupulous fashion.'

The ruc? The Fabian Society? No: the Gestapo. The quotation is from a secret hand- book prepared by them in 1940 for the use of the German intelligence and security services in Occupied Britain.