Traveller.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 386, 1 October 1903, Page 7

Traveller.

SCHOLARSHIPS FOR SERVANT I GIRLS.

some time the Technical EducaJMwt *" ioa Boar< * °* * be London County JKtfS Council has granted scholarships, in batches of 400, to girls of humble parentage, the subjects of free tuition being cookery, needlework and laundry operations. Here and there a domestic servant has secured one of these scholarships, but for the most part thay have failen to girls destined for other avocations. Now the board, by way of pcriment, is offering twenty free scholarships in cookery to girls, between 18 and 21 years of age, who have not less than two years, attended a public elementary or other school in Londoc, and who have been in domestic service for not leas than one year. A further condition is that their parents must be in receipt of not more than ,£3 a week or JCISO a year. Candidates will be required to pass a qualifying examination in elementary cookery. Holders of scholarships will receive free tuition at the National Training School of (Jookery for a period of twelve weeks, 'during which time they will be instructed in good household cookery.' Scholars will bo provided with dinner and tea on the days wben they attend the school, and tram, omnibus or railway fares will be paid to all living more than three miles from that institution. A PICTURESQUE STREET. Wonderful sights tbere are in China and among them in a street in the ancient town of Kaumi, which is now one of the German possessions. Europeans knew very little about it until the Germans settled there. That it is well worthy of study the few foreigners who have care r fully examined it assure us, and mainly because of the curious works of art which are to be found in it. The street is very old, and the buildings are, in some respecJ s, unlike those in any other part of the world. la the near futurs Eaumi will become better known, for a railroad will booh connect all the towns in German China. This will unquestionably prove a public benefit, and it is only to be hoped that this eagerness to improve the country will not impel any of these foreign colonists to remove any of the realJy artistic building in Eaumi. AT THE COURT OP THE SHAH; Thare is an element of Persian pictureequeness in the reception of foreign envoys to the Court of the Shah, remarks the 'St. James's Budget/ and Mr. Benj imin, who was the first American Minister to Persia, has given us an interesting glimpsa of a reception by the Foreign Minister of that strange country. «One approaches the reception department,' says Mr. Benjamin, 'through a spacious court shaded by lofty chenars. and graced with lovely parterres whose luxurious wilderness of roses, loading the air with perfume, is reflected in vast basins of crystalline water from the mountains. A group of retainers is gathered at the entrance, who rise respectfully as the visitor approaches, while the military guard presents arms. la the antechamber, through which one passes, the Pishketnet, o* purveyor of refreshments, and his assistants are seen with the tea urn, ever ready to serve the refreshments customary on the arrival of a Minister.' The visitor finds the Minister surrounded by a small host of servants sitting on their heels, not formally seated round a table, and Mr. Benjamin throws an interesting light on the way in which the State documents of Persia are written. ' Each servant sitting by the Minister has an ink horn by his side and a scroll of paper in his bosom, and when the Minister would dictate, he writes holding the paper in his left hand; in consequence the lines slant across the page. Persian official documents really exceed one side of a page, both the writing and the business expressions being concise, which is one reason why foreigners find such difficulty in clearly apprehending their purport. If the document exceeds the length of a page, it is carried round the margim in shorter lines. When the document is completed, the Minister annexes, not his signature, but his seal.' The sea) is universal in Persia, being removed each year and engraved with the date, and the counterfeit of a seal, whether private or public, is a capital offence. The Persian statesman, according to Mr. Benjamin, is a model of urbanity and good fellowship. JAPANESE A writer in the ' Japan Times,' in reporting the army manoeuvres which took place recently, makes the following interesting and amusing comments on the Japanese soldier : • If the British Tommy Atkins were to study the character of his Japanese brother-in-arms he would undoubtedly pronounce him a queer fish. His moßt striking characteristic is perhapß his gentlenets and his ssstheticism. 'I have seen privates walk hand in hand liko little school girls to a certain famous iris gardens situated at a distance of perhaps seven or eight miles from their barracks, pay for admittance, admire the irises for hours, and go home again, having tasted all the day nothing stronger than weak tea.

At intervals during the hottest fighting in China in 1900 the Japanese soldier hastened to unfold a fan which he carried with him and to fan himself. Even in his looting ho was a33lhetie, for th 6 objects he brought away with him, when he did bring anything away with him, and that was, of course, very seldom, were bric-a-brao whose value the Western soldier could not appreciate. 'A marked difference between the Japanese soldier and the British lies in the fact that ffhile King Edward's uniform has notoriously an attraction for nurses and general servants, the Mifcado's uniform possesses no such fascination. I have followed long precisions of conscripts to barracks, but have never .seen a girl waste a glance on them, and daring a residence of over three and a half years in this country I have never ones seen a solder ' walking out' a girl. 'lt is different with sailors, who get more opportunities of seeing foreign countries and improving their manners.'

aged to go to Edinburgh. The cost of university teaching and living was email enough to allow many of theße lads to act upon the advice, and the Scotch aeter helped them to distinction when they were there. Itisobvioul, too, that Edinburgh gained largely by the absence ot competition and by the value of its professional chairs. It not only had the pick of all the ablest students, but;it attracted and kept the professors. There was nothing in the United Kingdom which would tempt a good teacher to leave Edinburgh- In London, medical education then, as now, was carried on at many centres, no one of which conld compete with Edinburgh in sizs or in the emoluments paid to its teachers. There was, however, a reverse aide to the medal. The professors at Edinburgh, being better off there than anywhere else, stayed on too long. New blood was rarer at Edinburgh than even elsewhere. The tree Munros, for instance, monopolised the Chairs of Anatomy, Surgery, and Physiology for 141 years. Duncan taught as a profess; r j for thirty-nine years, Gregory ..for fortyfive yearr, Hope for fifty-three* years, Thomson for forty years. It is certaii that new ideas were in each of these cases not assimilated for more than a fraction of these long periods. As the professors examined their own students, the school did not suffer in comparison with others, but the progress of scientific medicine certainly suffered. Oa the other hand tt e organisation of the bedside medical teaching was much better at Edinburgh than at the best of the London schools, such as St. Bartholemew'a. Even as late' as 1820 Chiistison records that there was no clincal teaching on the medicil tiia at St. Bartholomew's, and no students. He cannot remember learning anything at all from the three physicians there. The surgical students, of which there several hundreds, never entered a medical ward. * About the year 1824, a powerful iaflueßce began to make itself felt in support of reform in medical education, and, the person who more than anyone elsecreated that influence was Thomas" Wakley, the founder and first editor of the * Lancet.' Wakley was a born re-; foimar and fighter. . . About the end of the century two great advances were made in the evolution of modern medicine Anesthetics were discovered and Virchow's 'Cellular Pathology' was published. Sir Samuel Wilkß has said th»t Virchow came to geaeralise, like another Newtop, and to give pathologists the Priacipia ot Medical Soience. The discovery of arseithetici was made known a few years before Virchow's great work was published. Its importance can scarcely be over-estimated. The initial step towarde the discovery might also b9 called accidental. It had been notioed empirically that pain was abolished by the inhalation of other. In 1848, Long, ofGaorgia, operated under ether narcosis. In 1844, a dentist, Horace Wells, UHed it several times, and in 1846 it was given by him in the Massachusetts < General Hospital while Dr. Norton removed a tumour from the neck, Morton from that date continued to use it. In December of the same year, the news of the discovery reached England. Professor Simpson took it up in Edinburgh, studied the comparative merits of several chemically related bodies, pronounced in favour of chloroform, and in 1847 he published details of fifty cases which, with perfect safety, it had been used to relieve the pain of child-birth. It was very soon applied to surgery. The' enormous gain to patients from the abolition of pain is obvious to everyone, but it is not on this ground that the claim of AEanthesia to be counted an important factor in the advance of medical science rests. The discovery of anesthetics removed the necessity for gsenk rapidity on the part of the surgeon. He was now, for the first time, abl# to be careful and minutely painstaking as to details. Another and less obvious result of asisithetics was the improvement of nursing which immediately followed. Se long as all surgery was torture scarcely less terrible to see than to bear, very few women were likely to adopt hospital nursing as a profession. Only those of Unusually strong nerves would voluntarily place themselves in the rcaj of having to witness, almost daily, suffering on that [scale, At the time of the Crimean War this effect on the alolition of pain during operations was just beginning to be felt, and the enthusiasm called forth by Miss Nightingale's services, high character, and alility expressed itself in the acoption of nursing as a profession by many women who would not have thought of entering the hospitals as nurses in the pre-antithetic days.