To those who like to stamp with their feet on the earth and feel that they're here because they're here the theories of Professor Stetson relative to the effect of the rising and the setting of the moon upon the latitude of a place may come as disturbing news. They may feel the solid ground fall beneath their feet, and when they think they're Fifty North and Forty West they may be in quite another locality.

Perhaps it is fortunate that the theory didn't come earlier. We might have lost two very convenient lines of verse if Fitz-James had realized that his rock was shifting from its firm base at that very minute. And Juliet might have spoken more respectfully of "the inconstant moon"--which is now, by its very inconstancy, shown to be the villain in the piece, exciting supposedly immovable earth to the most unsettling twitches and tremors.

It does seem as if the earth were the victim of a kind of heavenly conspiracy to make its crust crawl. Professor Stetson says that perhaps the stars, those eternal symbols of constancy, may be in the plot, too, allowing their rays to be deflected by an atmospheric tidal wave caused by the moon. Shifts in the axis of the earth, and tides in its crust are other possibilities, the scientists assure us, just like that.

It is all pretty upsetting to the stand-patters. The philosophers who insist that place is only relative, after all, will hall a support. We live in a world of change, they tell us, but we hadn't expected such confirmation. Some of us will take the news with equanimity, content to act in what appears to be a moving picture, but there is always the small person who, told that Niagara Falls was eating its way backward, eventually to wash away a nearby village, wept, fearful for the safety of a cherished aunt in that village.