song that the Eskimos sing,
When the penguin would be if he could on the wing,
Would soar to the sun if he could, like the lark,
But for most of the time it is totally dark.

Or hark to the bacchanal songs that resound
When they're making a night of it half the year round,
And carousing for months till the morning is pale,
Go home with the milk of the walrus and whale.

Oh list to the sweet serenades that are hers,
Who expensively gowned in most elegant furs,
Leans forth from the lattice delighted to know
That her heart is like ice and her hand is like snow.

* * * * *

God bless all the dear little people who roam
And hail in the icebergs the hills of their home;
For I might not object to be listening in
If I hadn't to hear the whole programme begin.
And the President preach international peace,
And Parricide show an alarming increase,
And a Justice at Bootle excuse the police,
And how to clean trousers when spotted with grease,
And a pianist biting his wife from caprice,
And an eminent Baptist's arrival at Nice,
And a banker's regrettably painless decease,
And the new quarantine for the plucking of geese,
And a mad millionaire's unobtrusive release,
And a marquis divorced by a usurer's niece--
If all of these items could suddenly cease
And leave me with one satisfactory thing
I really _should_ like to hear Eskimos sing.

This was hardly the expression of an attitude to science, but he did
have such an attitude. Life was to him a story told by God: the
people in it the characters in that story. But since the story was
told by God it was, quite literally, a magic story, a fairy story, a
story full of wonders created by a divine will. As a child a toy
telephone rigged up by his father from the house to the end of the
garden had breathed that magic quality more than the Transatlantic
Cable could reveal it in later life. It did not need mechanical
inventions to make him see life as marvellous. His over-ruling
interest was not in mechanics but in Will: the will of God had
created the laws of nature and could supersede them: the will of Man
could discover these laws and harness them to its purposes. Gold is
where you find it and the value of science depends on the will of
man: a position which may not sound so absurd in the light of the
harnessing of science to the purposes of destruction. When discussing