ON THE HOLE

Again Science comes to the rescue. This time it is the American Swiss cheese industry, which was threatened with ruin. The vital problem, explained by Professor Whitman of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, is to determine "without cutting open the cheese, when the holes are of proper size." It is easy to understand the gravity of this matter. Everyone who has had experience with the Swiss cheese of the good old-fashioned sort realizes that the holes are quite the most important part--absolutely essential, in fact, to the appearance, edibility and general atmosphere. Moreover, any cheese without the requisite number of holes per square foot, of proper diameter, would be promptly repudiated in a country so well instructed by comic sections. Where Swiss cheeses are unfailingly represented with holes for their identification, just as a tail differentiates man and monkey in the same school of Art. The disclosure of this difficulty will, of course, play havoc with the popular idea that the holes depend upon gangs of Swiss maidens who construct them with their teeth as well as the rival theory that the marksman ship of the Swiss fleet is responsible for the regularity of the pattern.

However, having grasped these fundamentals of the cheese industry, one can appreciate the anxiety of the cheese magnates. Clearly the holes must be orthodox, but if in order to ascertain their size, the cheese must be cut, an other calamity befalls, the cheese is spoiled. Here it is that Science shows herself truly worthy. The formidable X ray, already victor in a thousand fields, provides the quaking cheese bayous with the solution. A photograph was taken and eureka, "the holes developed on the negative as distinct dark spots". What could be more magnificent.