Our Gun Powder Survival

THE end of the human race has been variously discussed, from a fanatic invasion from Mars to our extinction by a comet or a collision with another celestial body.

Now come two individuals, a statesman and an historian, and gravely tell us that wars will extinguish the human race. It is utter moonshine.

Lord Halifax, British ambassador to Washington, delivers himself of this poppycock:

"If the nations fail after this war to make the most of their opportunties to forge a lasting peace, the human race may come perilously near to self-extermination."

Mr. H.G. Wells, even more dramatically than Lord Halifax, states:

"If man does not adjust himself very soon to the changes his inventions have wrought in his environment, he will disappear as a species."

Here we have plain rhetoric, with no semblance to anything but the sloppiest thinking. What Lord Halifax and H.G. Wells fail to note is that the human race can breed faster than it can exterminate its members by sword and cannon.

In spite of the fact that wars have been going on from earliest recorded time, that they are getting bigger and and more technical in each succeeding age, and that global conflicts are now the order of the day, the population of the world has steadily increased. There are more people on the globe today than when Caesar conquered Gaul. How long do you think it would take 2,000,000,000 individuals, quarreling by means of gun-powder, to obliterate themselves?

War, as a blood-letting process, is less deadly than disease. Cancer, tuberculosis, and heart disease exact a bigger toll than war. In 1940, these three diseases caused the death of 610,525 persons. This is more than our total casualties in World War I. We survive these afflications as we survive our losses on the battlefield.

Our total casualties in World War I were 364,800. This is equal to the population of a city the size of Indianapolis. We survived World War I, as did every other nation that engaged in it, and had, at the last census, a total population of 131,669,275, the largest in our history. Not even the vaquished nations were obliterated. Germany came back for more, full of fight and fury, and made a nasty mess of things, as she is likely to do again, in World War 3 or even in World War 20, if she finds an opportunity.

Total American casualties in the present World War, as reported, July, 1944, were 299,474. This is about one-seventh the number of persons born each year. How long, at this rate, do you think it will take our enemies to wipe out the United States?

And what of other countriess fighting in this war? There are 457, 836,475 Chinese. Japan has been at war with China for the past seven years and hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of Chinese obliteration. Yet we are told that the human race will be exterminated by war.

What, too, of India with its population of 388,997,955? Even the bubonic plague and cholera and a high death rate (India is estimated to lose a million inhabitants annually from tuberculosis alone) have not prevented India from increasing its population. That unhappy land, with its cobras and religion, now has 54,000,000 more inhabitants than it had 50 years ago.

You cannot kill off the human race by wars. If you could, it would have been extinguished long ago.

That Jonah Stuff Again

A STORY which went the rounds recently in newspapers served by the Associated Press told of a certain college professor who had crawled "into a whale," in order to prove that one of these animals could have swallowed Jonah. The New York Times captioned the item: "Scientist Crawls Through a Whale (Dead) and Says that Story of Jonah Could Be True." The account was embellished with all the fanciful trimmings of an imaginative reporter.

Doubting the veracity of the account as it appeared in the press, we wrote to the professor himself and received the following reply:--

The University of Chicago
Department of Pharmacology

Dear Mr. Teller:

All newspaper accounts dealing with my crawling through the gullet of a whale are grossly exaggerated. I merely replied to a question from a reporter. I was asked whether it was possible for a whale to swallow a human being, and my reply was that in my judgment it was possible for a large sperm whale to swallow an object the size of a human being. I did not go through the gullet into the stomach.

One day at the whaling station, we had a thin strip of a gullet from a sperm whale. I slipped this tissue over me, and felt convinced that there was room enough in the gullet of a large sperm whale for a human being to pass.
Yours very truly, E.M. Geiling

For every one who reads Dr. Geiling's denial of having crawled into the belly of a whale, there will be 100,000 persons who will remember the newspaper report, and tell us how a college professor once duplicated the Jonah trip.

Sperm whales have sharp teeth and tear their food to pieces before swallowing. Chunks of giant cuttlefish found in the bodies of these animals show mutilation by the dentition and corrosion by the acids of the stomach. A prophet intent on staying three days and three nights in the stomach of a sperm whale would have to watch his step before even approaching the gullet.

As to the size of the gullet, there is a vast difference between slipping "a thin strip" of the gullet over one's shoulders and crawling through that same gullet before it is removed from the body. Body tissues detached from their surrounding parts can be stretched and inflated much more readily than they can in their normal state. We are still waiting to see some good Fundamentalist crawl into the stomach of a whale -- and live. And this goes for either a living or a dead whale.

Mark Twain once remarked that a lie can travel half way around the world before truth can put its trousers on. It may be that this applies to running down newspaper reports of man-eating whales and the constant reiteration of Jonah yarns.