Oh, well for the collier lad As he curses his garb of grime! Oh, well for the man nigh mad With the heat in a torrid clime! O! well for the dark Lascar In the sea of ice or snow! But alas! without sun or moon or star, For the mariner down below! Sir Percy Scott's warning on the eve of the war of 1914, as I notice elsewhere, was not taken seriously by _Punch_. To go back to 1901, it was in that year that an acute controversy raged over the efficiency of the "Belleville" tubular boilers, but _Punch_ contented himself with merely registering the conflicting views of the experts. [Illustration: A NEW STAR] [Sidenote: _Röntgen Rays and Radium_] The discovery of the Röntgen rays in 1896 and of radium in 1903 are not absolutely neglected; but that is about all that can be said of _Punch's_ frivolous comments on these momentous new-comers. On the other hand, the possibilities and abuses of the cinematograph were his constant preoccupation from 1896 onwards. _Punch_ attended an exhibition given by a M. Trewey in that year, and, while making play with the exhibitor's name, was sufficiently up-to-date to allude to the "Pictures" and to foresee the inevitable abbreviation of their classical title. In 1901, under the heading "What it must never come to," _Punch_ only too correctly foreshadowed the vulgarity and indecorum of the film play in later years. Nearly half a century earlier _Punch_ had chronicled the flight of the "Wild geese" to the gold diggings in California and Australia. Later on South Africa had become the lure to all who suffered from the _auri sacra fames_. In 1897 it was the turn of the New World again, and Klondyke and the Yukon were words on every lip. The old story of fortunes and failures was once more repeated, though not on so large a scale, and _Punch_ summed up its lessons in his pessimistic picture of exhausted diggers in Arctic surroundings lying at the feet of a sinister skeleton figure guarding a great gold nugget.