THE

HE dauntless cave-man no longer bounds after the lilting ichthyosaur from Rocky to Rocky, the valiant redskin no longer pursues the whiffling buffalo from prairie to prairie; but the intrepid flat-dweller still hunts the buzzing fly from room to room. The paleolithic clubwallop survives as the sanitary swat.

From mastodon-hunting to fly-hunting, such, in brief, has been the progress of civilization. The man of to-day, accustomed to plowing with a can-opener and raising vegetables with a dumb-waiter, leaves jungle-roaming to ex-Presidents and moving-picture producers, preferring to enjoy the pleasures of the chase at home. His delight is an intellectual one: he does not value game according to mere vulgar bulk; shooting a dinosaur with a cannon would seem to him an extremely crass performance. Even his great-grandfathers realized that trout afforded greater sport than cod.

Primitive man hunted merely to obtain food. Modern man, believing in sport for sport's sake, swats for the swatting alone, for the glory of it. He scorns the use of sticky paper, classing such snares with seines and bird-lime; he will have nothing but the clean swat in the open. He can point to the trophies of the chase that adorn his walls, and tell you that every one of those flies was killed in a sportsmanlike manner.

Yet it is not purely sport for sport's sake that actuates him: there is a moral impulse as well. In swatting a creature that is hygienically undesirable, whose private life compels social ostracism, he satisfies his instinct for reform. Every down swat is an uplift, giving vent to the "Excelsior!" with which his head is stuffed.

On with sweetness and light! (Swat, swat! Missed him.) Sanitation forever! (There he goes under the table.) The morally unfit must be eliminated! (Swat!

In advanced stages

on the infants' faces. of the disease they even swat dotted veils and blueberry cake.

What will be the final consummation of the hunting instinct when evolution has completed its work? While guesses are uncertain, we believe that fly-swatting will eventually give way to germ-hunting; that the sporting man of the millennium will have in his biological kennels a pack of trained bacteria, and that with these he will hunt wild germs. In that happy age some super-Thompson - Seton (or will it be super-Seton-Thompson again by that time?) will write of Gogo,

the Brave Old Measles Germ-how he kept fourteen leucocytes at bay, and fought desperately till carbolic acid overcame him. It will be a great battle.

G M

ANNA PAVLOWA

GERTRUDE HOFFMANN

When in the dusk the fireflies flit
About thy lawns, thy windows, lit
From my great dynamo, will shame
Their poor, pale phosphorescent flame.
Sometimes thou 'lt stroll in dappled shade
Through woodland paths, macadam-laid;
And gather lilies, silver-cool,
From many a well-cemented pool.

The nut, the berry, sweet and wild,
Shall give thee of their flavors mild,
Judiciously eked out with quail,
With truffles, and madeira pale.

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That stream and valley, dale and field,
The Plaza or the Ritz can yield.