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THE HOME RARER EDITORIAL RAGE THE ATLANTA GEORGIAN Published Every Afternoon Except Sunday By THE GEOROIAN COMPANY At 20 East Alabama St., Atlanta, Ga. Entered aj eecond-class matter at poatofflce at Atlanta, under act of March 3.1873 Subscription Price—Delivered by carrier, 10 cents a week. By mail, $5 00 a year Payable in Advance The Demon of Ambition Is the Champion Driver of All the World Lucky You, If He Is YOUR Driver, for He Will Give You No Peace, No Rest, No Chance I o Be Lazy. At the top of this page is a picture of the world's greatest driver. Lucky the man whom he harnesses and drives through life. This wonderful little coachman, the Demon of Ambition, is the champion driver of all the world and of all history. Lucky you, if he is YOUR driver. He will give you no peace, no rest, no chance to be lazy. He will keep you going until you do something worth while —working, running and moving ahead—until the last day. AND THAT IS HOW A REAL MAN OUGHT TO BE DRIVEN. This little driver is the Demon that drove Columbus across the ocean, that drove Napoleon over the Alps, that drove the Wright brothers up into the air, that kept Washington fighting when his soldiers ran away and every battle ended in defeat. This is the Demon that works in our brains, that makes the blood tingle at the thought of achievement and that makes the face flush and'grow white at the thought of failure. Every one of us has this Demon for a driver, in YOUTH AT LEAST. Unfortunately the majority of us he gives up as very poor, worthless things, not worth driving, by the time we reach twen ty-five or thirty. How many men look back to their teens when they were harnessed to the wagon of life with Ambition for a driver? When they could not wait for the years to pass and for oppor tunity to come? How many remember the whip that Ambition laid on their The Atlanta Georgian Does This Little Devil Drive You? Lucky You, if the Demon of Ambition Is Your Driver. He Will Make You Trot Fast. AND GET SOME WHERE. backs? And how many unfortunately remember the gradual death of the driver and the cessation of effort? It is the duty of Ambition to drive, and it is your duty TO KEEP AMBITION ALIVE AND DRIVING. Now in the summer weather especially you can test your self and learn what you are apt to be in future. If you are doing nothing, if there is no driving, no hurrying, no working, YOU MAY COUNT UPON IT THAT THERE WILL BE NO RESULTS, NOTHING MUCH WORTH WHILE IN THE YEARS TO COME. Those that are destined to be the big men twenty years from now, when the majority of us will be nobodies, ARE THOSE WHOM THIS DEMON IS DRIVING RELENTLESSLY, RE- j MORSELESSLY, THROUGH THE HOT WEATHER AND THE COLD WEATHER, THROUGH EARLY HOURS AND LATE HOURS. Lucky YOU, if you are in harness and driven as the man is i driven in this picture. And UNHAPPY you, if you sit at your ease with nothing to drive you, with self-complacency and empty excuses as your ; companions in idleness. Still No Help for Our Merchant ! Marine There are to-day only five American ships regularly in the trans-Paciflc trade. They have to meet competition from The Canadian-Pacific Steamship Company; subsidy, $218,000 a year. The Nippon Yoseu Kaisha; subsidy, $238,000 a year. The Osaka Shoshen Kaisha; subsidy, $605,000 a year. The Toyo Tisen Kaisha; subsidy, $1,340,000 a year. So that there is little chance of building up a merchant marine in the great Pacific so long as Congress continues to neg lect these interests; and there is every chance of losing the little we have left. Our merchant marine is thus vanishing, first, because it costs more to build a ship in America than in Japan or Great Britain or Germany, that extra cost being nearly all the extra cost of labor under the American standards of living. Second, it costs more to operate an American ship for precisely the same reason. American industries on land are protected by tariffs. Why not those on the sea? It is conceded that absolute free trade would be ruinous to our industries on land. IT HAS RUINED OUR INDUSTRIES ON THE SEA. To protect our industries on the sea a 5 per cent discrimina tion in the tariff in favor of imports brought in American ships was put into the Underwood Tariff bill. This clause should be put back into the bill, passed, and put into rigid operation; and wherever there are treaties blocking its operation, those treaties should be terminated as soon as possible, The cash cost of neglect is A MILLION DOLLARS A DAY paid to foreign shipowners for carrying American commerce, or just about ENOUGH IN ONE YEAR TO PAY THE ENTIRE COST OF THE PANAMA CANAL! / July Evening Growing Old and Out of Fashion . * # Selected by EDWIN MARKHAM How to Measure Motions of the Stars By EDGAR LUCIEN LARKIN. D R. WOODS HUTCHINSON, in his book, “Common Diseases.” published by Houghton Mifflin and Company, entertainingly discusses old-age conditions that will come to each of us If we live long enough. "If we are going to do -any thing to cure the disease of old age, we must begin before birth. Indeed, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wittily remaiked on the preven tion of disease, ‘we must begin with the grand-parents.' The so- called senile changes are changes which have been going on ever since we began our individual ex istence. ‘ The time when we begin to feel old. the particular period at which we begin to ‘show our age.' is merely .that period at which these internal changes have reached and shown themselves upon the surface; in which, so to speak, these microscopic alterations have finally become visible to the naked eye. "It Is nothing short of absurd to say that a man becomes old, or senile, or Incapable of further development or incapable of the conception of new ideas at, or after, any special or particular age. There is no one period of life in which we grow, and an other in which we decline. Both processes are going on side by side in every part of our body from the day we are born. Just as the life of the body means the death of certain of its cell**, so the growth of e\* v y power and faculty means the sacrifice and the decay of others. Every prim itive cell of the embryo lays down part of its life to become a mus cle-cell, a neurone, a blood-cor puscle or a bone cell. “The process has no limit, any more than It has beginnings. Life is just that, one-third dying that two-thirds may live, whether it be the single cell or the hugest and most elaborate body. While in such gross matters as mere avoir dupois and stature, and the actu al horsepower of our muse’ . we reach a limit, a period of wnat we are pleased to call maturity, at a comparatively early age; yet In other and more important re spects we continue to grow and develop steadily, to a very much later period—fifty-five, sixty, and even seventy years. New and valuable achievements, master pieces In every realm of human activity and interest, have been produced hundreds of times in every decade, up to and including the ninth. "It is obvious then that there is no hard and fast ‘dead line’ which can possibly be drawn, be yond which no further growth, or fresh creative effort, or new en terprise. or Improvement is pos sible. In fact, by living a health ful. active, happy life, and keep ing up all our interests, we can grow and develop and adjust our selves, and feel that we are grow ing until we are one day sud denly dead without ever realizing in any distressing or painful way that we are growing old at all/V 4 4^AEEING that you answer scientific question in The Georgian, I take the lib erty to ask you the following question: How do .astronomers assign proper motions to the stars?” A.—By long and accurate trig- nometrical measures of distances of a suspected star from a num ber of adjacent stars. When we attach a micrometer—small meas ure—to a telescope and look in, we see a system of crossed, fixed and movable spider threads. In some micrometers the lines are all movable. One Is turned until it is In the celestial equator and the other In the celestial meridian. Then, at intervals the distance of the star east of the meridian or right ascension Is measured with great accuracy and recorded; likewise its distance north or south of the equator declination •s measured with extreme care and recorded. Detecting Changes. If the places are different, the star has moved—perhaps. But the motion may be that of both base lln*s, meridian and equator. They both slide around the en tire celestial vault from east to west in a mighty period of 25,878 years. This mysterious motion must be computed, and added to, or abstracted from, the measured motion of the star under ex amination. Aberration of light is another harassing correction. Re-> fraction of light In our atmos phere must be measured and al lowed for also. The retrogra- dation of the equator and meridi an affects all stars alike; then, to detect absolute motion of any one star, keep measuring dis tances from it to others adja cent. Suppose that five pets of tri angles were made from our sus pected star to five others, and many sets from these five to each other to-day. Then, in a year or two, let the triangulations all be made again. If the angles from star to star show no change, they are known to be at such stupend ous distances that their real mo tions are insensible. But if all the five angles leading to the wander ing star have changed, the amount of change can be meas ured; but In angle only. The dis placement in miles cannot be told until the star’s distance from the earth is first found. It took 120 years of hard study to find the distance of the near est star, 25 trillion miles. Since the invention of the micrometer proper motions have been detect ed in all directions in the celes tial vault. These are mostly very small in angle, but very great in miles. The most rapid motion of any star known for a long time was that of the star numbered 1830 in Astronomer Groombridge’s catalogue, given in between 7 and 8 seconds of arc annually. But Astronomer Kap- teyn discovered on a photograph of the stars a small one having the most rapid proper motion known, 9 second of arc per year. There are 1,296,000 seconds in a circle, which would make the time required for one circuit of the sideral universe 144,000 years. Our Sun’s Neighbor. The > nearest neighbor our sun has, the sun Alpha Centauri, moves 3.7 seconds per year, while the gigantic sun Arcturus tra verses 4.3 seconds. The angular ] diameter of the moon is 1,920 j seconds, so the time for Arturus j to move over a sky space equal I to the angular diameter of our I moon is 450 years. The majority ] of suns having proper motions 1 move with rates of from 10 to 12 1 seconds per century. These rates | require hundreds of thousands 1 of years to change the conflgura- 1 tion of the constellations of the | stellar structure. These movements were all de- | tected and measured by means of | the micrometer. But suppose a j star to be coming on a straight ! line toward the earth, or going I away on a straight line. The mi- ] crometer is useless in these cases, j But one of the most wonderful | achievements of human hands and mind was the discovery that 1 a high-power spectroscope could I solve this apparently insoluble | problem—-.the measurement In I miles per second of approach oi I recession in the line of sight, Any center emitting light sends \ out waves of light-energy. In white light there are an almost infinite number of shades or tints, merging together. A prism sep arate into seven well-defined groups; the shortest waves ars violet in color and range 63,000 in one inch, while dull red waves j are 33,000 to the Inch. But the fact was discovered that if the light is approaching the waves are compressed, and the band oi ! colors shifts sidewise toward ths violet; and if receding, the waves are lengthened and the band shifts toward the red. Speeds of the Stars. Years of arduous research has revealed that the stars nearly all move with specific speeds of from 10 to 30 miles per second; pui star, the sun. moving about 13 miles per second. But the rapid stars, those having large power motions, say of 8 or 9 seconds ol arc per year, are flying at such terrific velocities that they form a class by themselves. Their speeds are between 100 and 500 miles per second, the latter be ing that of the huge sun Arc turus. The attraction of the quanitity of miles in all suns, that is, bodies that are visible to the eye, or to photographic plates, is totally unable to cause these immense velocities. This shows that the quantity of in visible matter is far greatre than in the 100,000,000 visible bodies The quantity of matter able to impart a speed of 100 or 500 miles per second is far beyond all Imagination.