TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 13908, 6 December 1910, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

There are people who

The declare boldly not only Physiology that war will never be of War. abolished so long as

human nature is what it is, but that war is necessary to maintain the virility of the race. A German scientist recently numbered war among the necessary physiological actions of

life, eating, sleeping and making love being tho others. The subject was introduced at a recent gatherig of the Authors' Club, which met to hear an address by that well-known expert, Professor Spencer Wilkinson, on tho teaching of military history. The chairman, Mr H. de Verc Stacpoole. said that many people would demur to recognising war as a necessity of life, but an experiment performed recently in Paris by Professor Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute, seemed to him to demonstrate fully the truth of the German contention. Metchnikoff took a number of frogs in tho embryo stage. Home he brought up in sterilised water in a sterilised tank, ! and fed them on sterilised food. Never in Nature had frogs been so protected as theso were. They had no enemies at all. The rest were brought au naturel —that is to say, they were exposed to the odinary dangers that lie in tho path of frogs—especially microbes. "Now what was tho result? Of the unprotected frogs a few died fiom the diseases and severities of life to which they were exposed, but the remainder grew up into line, sizeable, healthy frogs, a credit to their class. Of the protected frogs, all grew up to froghood, but they had been happier dead, for they were miserable, anaemic creatures, a disgrace to their class, .and, in fact, what you would call in England, no d—d good." Mr iStac- : poole pointed a moral at England. Wero England to be placed in a vast sterilised taiiK and protected from all foreign attack "You would lift the cover «it the cud of one hundred years to find Englishmen in the state of Metchnikoff's protected frogs." Mr asked tho gathering to imagine what the world would be like to-day if perfee. and idyllic peace had fallen on it in tho Stone Age. They would still be sitting in the Stone Age, for "it was war, redhanded war. that took us by tho scruffs of our necks and dragged us from tho company of the cariboo and the musk ox into our present state of tion." The advocates of peace would doubtless argue that the benificent influence of war on civilisation is greatly exaggerated, and that man has now reached a state of progress at which war simply means degradation.

Apparently England is as Terrible far idiead of some countries Prisons, in her prison system as sho

is in her criminal procedure —to which the Crippcn case has called flattering attention—if the treatment by France and Italy of their criminals may be taken as a standard. To begin with, both of these countries, Italy particularly, veto capital punishment. All of the worst class of criminals, including murderers, are deported to islands, in the case of France, French Guiana and New Caledonia, and in the case of Italy, Ponza, Ventotena, San Stefano, and others in the Bay of Naples and tho Adriatic. At first sight this would seem a most humane scheme, but on inspection it becomes entirely changed. In the Italian islands there are about 8000 criminals of a type almost indescribable. One-third of them are women and tho authorities not only permit marriages between men and women criminals but they allow wives from the mainland to join their convict husbands. It may be said that it is only those at liberty on the islands who can live this domestic lifo and that the murderers are thus kept apart, but it is not so. Even the murderers are free in less than three years. That is why Marcel Provost calls the Mediterranean islands "Devil incubators." How can it be otherwise when the child born of murderers is brought up in an atmosphere of crime to lie let loose on the world as soon as it is of age? Inter-marriage between criminals is also allowed among the 16,871 convicts that fill tho French tropical penal colonies, and there is a nativo population to be reckoned with. But there is a great difference between these tropical islands and those of the Mediterranean. Whether or not the French criminals are demons it is certain they live in a hell. The climate'breathes pestilence. Malaria, yellow fever, snakes, vampires, red ants assail the convict on all sides. To escape by sea is to be eaten by sharks, by land to die of starvation. Still in this country children are born to them, and should they survive they perhaps live to return to Paris to repeat crimes of an even grosser type than those which sent their fathers and their mothers to tho French penal colonies.

To shave or not to shave ? — WTiy that is the question winch

the "American Medicine" has Beard? called "tho newest hygienic

puzzle. It has been stated that medical authorities hold that the beard is likely to shelter bacteria, and awful pictures have been drawn of the results following a surgeon with a hairy face performing an operation. Some have gone even further and have said that bearded men are subject to colds because of the many germs their beards make a. home for. While the editor of "American Medicine" does not deny that some weight may be attached to these theories, he adds: "Before advising men to shave, we would liko to be convinced that it really has a beneficial result." He continues that another problem he would like to see solved is why men were given beards at all if they did not serve some good purpose for which women have no need. It had often been alleged that the object of whiskers may have been to make primitive man appear attractive in the eyes of primitive woman; that the possessors of bunches of hair had extra chances of securing a mate, and that he mas' therefore have gloried in his chin-tuft, even though he found it as cumbersome as the bird of paradise doubtless finds its enormous tail feathers. This theory fails, the writer is of opinion, because the beard does not make its appearance until after the age at which primitive man may be presumed to have settled down to the duties (whatever they may have been in the stone age) of married life. Other physiological reasons for its evolution must be found. Another suggestion is that in those dead days the beard served some purpose in fighting or hunting, which were about the only things man did at th© timo when man's faoe became differentiated from woman's. What that benefit was is a thing forgotten. Apparently, woman, leading a more protected, stay-at-home existence, had no need for it, and from this it is argued that modern men, who do not fight or hunt, must be just as

well oS without it. As to outdoor workers, tho writer reserres judgment pending the gaining of further knowledge, believing that this riould not be a difficult matter, for the cause must have been a potent one to have such a vast distinction between the sexes. ''It is generally assumed that beards are still protective in some way, and we would not like to accuse Nature cf foolishness until we have the proofs, for we havo never vet found her a fool." He might have added that the findings of learned men would havo little to do with tho shaving of their less educated fellows.