Nobody believes in coincidences, but they go on happening all the same and one has just happened in the literary world that is curious enough to astonish even a publisher. It was recently announced in the Press that a tract of land recovered by the German prisoners from the sea off Norfolk has proved so "full of the food that plants desire" that everything on it is growing with amazing luxuriance. It produces crops in such plenty that harvesting them is becoming a problem. A week or so before that report appeared, the judges in. Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton's 'First Novel" prize competition awarded the prize to Mr. Cuthbert' Edward Baines for a novel of the near future with a strikingly original plot which turns on the recovery from the sea of certain land on the Essex coast. A hitherto unknown fertilising quality discovered in this soil, the supply of which the altruistic discoverer limits mainly to smallholders, has the effect of stimulating a "back to the land' movement, reakes farming profitable and food so plentiful and cheap as to bring about a complete revolution in economic conditions, so that instead of the workers combining to upset: the existing order, capitalists, commercial magnates and politicians are goaded into forming secret societies and plunging into de sperate and criminal courses to ruin or secure control of the fertilizer and put an end to the phenomenal agricultural prosperity that is crippling their private enterprises. he result is a star that combines the topical interest and philosophy of a sociological with the excitement of a sensational romance. It 1s the first novel Mr. Baines has ever written and the publishers claim that it is the most remarkable first novel that has seen the light for many a day. "The Black Circle," will be published by Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton in the autumn, In philosophical circles Relativity has become almost as blessed a word as Mesopotamia. Its potency is such as to have aroused the activity of even Shanghai intellectual! The latest thinker to make use of it is Viscount Haldane, who has published with Mr. Murray a volume "The Reign of Relativity" which in a way carries on the philosophical purpose of his two volumes, published sixteen years ago, "The Pathway to Reality." In spite, perhaps, of its subject tne work has a personal interest as—in his own word—on the day of Lord Haldane's release in 1915 from his office as Lord Chancellor, he projected this book.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.