Imbalance

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Those peculiar happenings of last August are pretty well explained now. Among other places, they happened in that val­ley in the Himalayas, and up in the Amazon Basin, and in Syd­ney, Australia, and Perth Am-boy, New Jersey, and most no­ticeably in Tres Aguas, Nevada. These were not all the spots where oddities turned up, but they make a representative se­lection. We know now that the balance of nature had gotten temporarily upset, and that the cosmos reacted dynamically to the situation, in order to restore things to normal. It's a great re­lief to know that it happens, that things do return to normal. It used to be believed that if the balance of nature were dis­turbed, that deplorable things would happen until the world went to hell in a hand-basket. But now we know it isn't so.

We're lucky.

The picture is fairly complete. Some phenomena were typical. In a remote valley of the Himalayas, for example, two rocks rolled downhill and came to rest near two other rocks. And then there were five. There'd been this slight disturbance of the balance of na­ture, and the natural law that two and two make four had slipped a cog at that particular place. Up in the Amazon Basin a Jivaro Indian shot an arrow at a bird in a tree. He missed. The arrow kept on going. Up. It went clean out of sight with no signs of slowing up. Nature being slightly off the beam, the law that says what goes up must come down wasn't working just there just then. In Sydney, Australia, a tea-shop proprietor noticed that two tea-cakes which were equal to a third teacake weren't equal to each other. And in a machine shop in Perth Amboy, New Jer­sey, for the duration of a cof­fee-break, the natural law that says every action must have a re­action of equal moment and op­posite sign took a coffee-break too.

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