indered the outgoing! Ah, here is the snare that catches
rough-and-ready common sense! How long would the double journey have
taken _if the river current had been faster than our rowing speed_?
How shall we schedule our trip if we cannot learn the correct speed,
_or if it varies from minute to minute_?

These explanations are necessarily symbolistic rather than
demonstrative, but any one who will seriously follow out these lines
of thought, or, still better, study the attitude of the hard-headed
modern physicist towards our classical geometry and mechanics,
cannot fail to realize how conventional, artificial--even
phantasmal--are the limitations set by the primitive idea of flat
space and straight time.

The inferences which we may draw from our hypothetical experiment
are plain. The settings of the two chronometers would be defective,
they would not show the same time, but each of them would mark the
_local_ time, proper to its own place. There would be no means of
detecting the amount of error, since the messages were transmitted
by a medium involved with them in their transportation. If only
local time can be established, the possibility of a warped
time-plane--the curvature of time--is directly opened up. Doubtless
it is true that on so relatively minute a scale as is offered by the
earth, any deviation from perfect flatness of the time-plane would
be so inconsiderable and imperceptible as to make it scientifically
negligible; but this by no means follows when we consider our
relation to other worlds and other systems.

A similar condition holds with regard to space-distortion. The
Theory of Relativity enforces the conclusion that from the
standpoint of our conventions in regard to these matters, all bodies
involved in transportation undergo a contraction in the direction of
that transportation, while their dimensions perpendicular to the
transportation remain invariable. This contraction is the same for
all bodies. For bodies of low velocity, like the earth, this
distortion would be almost immeasurably slight; but great or little,
no measuring instruments on the body transporting would ever
disclose it, for a measure would undergo the same contraction as the
thing measured.

THE SPOON-MAN

These concepts that space and time are not as immutable as they
appear: that our universe may suffer distortion, that time may lag
or hasten without our being in the least aware, may be made
interestingly clear by an il