EDUCATIONAL SORCERY

In a certain London revue, the audience one moment beholds a slim and graceful heroine seated on some very formidable-looking rocks, wailing for her lover. The next moment the rocks dissolve into a Hindu temple, and the heroine gains considerably in avoirdupois. All this--as the spectacle plays advertise--is "Not a Moving Picture". Nor is it one of those tricks of the stage such as the New York Hippodrome delights in. It is merely an illusion produced by lights of proper color and intensity.

Imagine the benefits of an invention such as this! An ancient problem for lecturers in these parts is that of holding the attention of their listeners. You can keep some of them awake all the time; you can keep all of them awake some of the time; but you can't keep all of them awake all the time. A large number of the would-be audience relapse at intervals into a state of somnolence, during which it is, for all practical purposes, entirely useless.

But now all that is ended. When the lecturer finds himself talking into thin air, he has but to throw a switch, and behold! the New Lecture Hall or Emerson D has become a grassy hillside; the seats are moss-covered rocks and the aisles, sparkling trout streams. As for the lecturer himself, he has taken on the glow of eternal youth. If this palls, another switch will change the hall into a grey and gloomy cavern, lined with stalactites and stalagmites; and so on--endless changes, endless variation. Thus can we put our old wine in new bottles, and completely deceive the luckless undergraduate with a couple of dozen "mazdas".