RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 223, 16 June 1932, Page 6

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL (By Kickshaws.) According to a Canadian Senate® all our troubles would be cured by a common currency. Assuredly ths present system gives us something so uncommon as to be positively elusive A sentimental woman writer in America declares that It isn’t always easy for the average woman to find the man she wants. Especially when the man she wants knows she wants to tell him it is time to mow the grass. It is reported that a turf-lifting device has just been invented by an Auckland gardener. Despondent golfers declare that the reverse would be a fa? more useful invention. • • • In connection with auras, mentioned in this column a day or two ago, a Wellington consulting chemist by-name A. E. Aldridge, has pointed out that dicyanin, used for light filters In order to make auras visible, has actually been made up by him for that purpose for a doctor in this Dominion. This chemical is a derivative from coal tar, and is very difficult to obtain. Only one firm in the world makes it Its cost is roughly £2OOO per lb, and only a minute amount is in existence. Mr. Aldridge says that the filter made from some of the chemical imported into New Zealand undoubtedly made it possible to see auras round human bodies. • « « The doctor who was experimenting with auras, mentioned above, Is now dead. Bnt he claimed to be able to see three distinct coloured auras round a person. From their distribution and continuity he was able to diagnose disease. In some cases a diseased spot caused a distinct bulge in the aura. After using the light filter for a time the doctor discovered that he could see these manifestations without the use of the filter. As there is still a little dicyanin left from the supply obtained for the original light filter, efforts will be made to make up another filter in order to see if these tests can be repeated. Mr. Aldridge promises to report results. # Tn spite of the fact that the master of the research ship Discovery IL turned down offers from young woman to join the venture, the very fact that such offers were made is yet another sign of the times. Fifty years ago no a venture. She would have been called woman who offered her services in such a venture. She would have been called an Amazon, or something much more impolite. But women have already m de their mark on the sea. Was it not a woman who brought the Primrose Hill safely to port when everyone of the crew including the master were dead or dying of small-pox? One has to talk to the old salts of Tacoma in their own dialect to grasp the magnitude of the task hat was done by this lone woman of the seg.

But we need not go to Tacoma for true sea stories of, shall we say, sailorwomen, or able-bodied seawomen. One day not so very long ago a little German schooner, Johanna, entered the port of Fremantle. Those who raked her with telescopes saw not a living soul on board. When the pilot went aboard he found a woman at the wheel. She was the only able-bodied soul on board. On the run from Mauritius to Melbourne the crew had succumbed to fever. When she made port only the captain, her husband, and the mate were alive, both delirious with fever. The whole burden of running the ship had fallen upon one lonely woman with a newborn baby. 'For days she had nursed the sick, buried those that died, nursed her baby, prepared the food, and sailed and navigated the ship to port. If the examples above are not enough to show that many a woman has undeniable aptitude and a strong leaning to a nautical life, it is only necessary to point out that before now women stowaways on windjammers have proved their mettle. Only last year when the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie was racing with wool from Australia to England a woman stowaway was found on board. Her only excuse for this lamentable lapse was that she wanted to sail round the Horn as a seaman, but nobody would give her a job. It Is a sign of the times. In time there may be no seamen on the high seas at all. u • • “Constant Reader” of Foxton, has sent along the following numismatical inquiry:—Having read your daily column for some time and haying noticed son e of the queer questions which some people ask, I have plucked up courage to write to you. I have in my possession a French five centimes piece coined during the reign of Napoleon 111. Would you tell me if there is any value attached to it? Mr. Allan Sutherland, hon. see. of the New Zealand Numismatic Society, who has examined the rubbing of the coin in question, says:—The copper coin in the possession of “Constant Reader” is a five centimes of Napoleon 111. of a type which was issued in large quantities in France during the middle of last century. It is really the French equivalent of the English halfpenny. Obverse: Head of Napoleon 111. Reverse: Eagle with wings outstretched. The coin is of no particular value.

The case of the prisoner, sentenced recently at Auckland to a month’s im- , prisonment, who persuaded the magistrate to double the sentence, reminds one of a story of another prisoner in England who had somewhat similar yearnings. Time after time he would commit some crime and be sentenced to ever-increasing terms of imprisonment. In spite of heart-to-heart talks by well meaning individuals no sooner was he out of prison than he was in again. Magistrates were nonplussed bv the fascination that the local prison seemed to have for the man. .The only time the fellow seemed disappointed was when some kind-hearted magistrate gave him another chance. One day carpenters repairing the woodwork in one of the cells discovered half a dozen pearls secreted in a putty covered crevice. For some reason the prison-mad criminal had been unable to extract them after serving his first term. Ever since the poor fellow had been sending himself to prison in the hopes that in the end the laws of probability working in harmony with the ever responsive laws of the land, would be kind and land him in that self-same cell. After the discovery magistrates had w> further trouble from tills naß