Can we imagine for one instant that the children of that race had never spun a top or trundled a hoop, and so had had no chance of being led to the greatest study of nature? No; the only possible explanation lies in the great novelist's never
having done these things himself. He had probably as a child a contempt for the study of nature, he was a baby Pelham, and as a man he was condemned to remain in ignorance even of the powers of the new race that he had created.
The Vril-ya ignorance of the behaviour of spinning bodies existing as it does side by side with their deep knowledge of magnetism, becomes even more remarkable when it comes home to us that the phenomena of magnetism and of light are certainly closely connected with the behaviour of spinning bodies, and indeed that a familiar knowledge of the behaviour of such bodies is absolutely necessary for a proper comprehension of most of the phenomena occurring in nature. The instinctive craving to investigate these phenomena seems to manifest itself soon after we are able to talk, and who knows how much of the intellectual inferiority of woman is due to her neglect of the study of spinning tops; but alas, even for boys in the pursuit of top-spinning, the youthful mind and muscle are left with no other guidance than that which is supplied by the experience of young and not very scientific companions. I remember distinctly that there were many puzzling problems presented to me every day. There were tops which nobody seemed able to spin, and there were others, well
prized objects, often studied in their behaviour and coveted as supremely valuable, that behaved well under the most unscientific treatment. And yet nobody, even the makers, seemed to know why one behaved badly and the other well.
I do not disguise from myself the fact that it is rather a difficult task to talk of spinning tops to men who have long lost that skill which they wonder at in their children; that knowingness of touch and handling which gave them once so much power over what I fear to call inanimate nature. A problem which the child gives up as hopeless of solution, is seldom attacked again in maturer years; he drives his desire for knowledge into the obscure lumber-closets of his mind, and there it lies, with the accumulating dust of his life, a neglected and almost forgotten instinct. Some of you may think that this instinct only remains with those minds so many of which are childish even to the limit of life's span; and probably none of you have had the opportunity of seeing how the old dust rubs off from the life of the ordinary man, and the old desire comes back to him to understand the mysteries that surround him.
But I have not only felt this desire myself, I have seen it in the excited eyes of the crowd of people who stand by the hour under the dropping cherry-blossoms beside the red-pillared temple of
Asakusa in the Eastern capital of Japan, watching the tedzu-mashi directing the evolutions of his heavily rimmed Koma. First he throws away from him his great top obliquely into the air and catches it spinning on the end of a stick, or the point of a sword, or any other convenient implement; he now sends it about quite carelessly, catching it as it comes back to him from all sorts of directions; he makes it run up the hand-rail of a staircase into a house by the door and out again by the window; he makes it travel up a great corkscrew. Now he seizes it in his hands, and with a few dexterous twists gives it a new stock of spinning energy. He makes it travel along a stretched string or the edge of a sword; he does all sorts of other curious things with his tops, and suddenly sinks from his masterful position to beg for a few coppers at the end of his performance.
How tame all this must seem to you who more than half forget your childish initiation into the mysteries of nature; but trust me, if I could only make that old top-spinner perform those magical operations of his on this platform, the delight of the enjoyment of beautiful motion would come back. Perhaps it is only in Japan that such an exhibition is possible; the land where the waving bamboo, and the circling hawk, and the undulating summer sea, and every beautiful motion of nature
are looked upon with tenderness; and perhaps it is from Japan that we shall learn the development of our childish enthusiasm.
The devotees of the new emotional art of beautiful motion and changing colour are still in the main beggars like Homer, and they live in garrets like Johnson and Savage; but the dawn of a new era is heralded, or rather the dawn has already come, for Sir William Thomson's achievements in the study of spinning tops rank already as by no means the meanest of his great career.