RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 87, 6 January 1933, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL (By Kickshaws.) The situation in China seems to be that Japan promises not to acquire that country by force if China promises not to resist. * » « Perhaps the real reason why there were fewer bankruptcies in Wellington last year was because there are now fewer people to go bankrupt • • • Russian experts are stated to have produced a scheme for converting cattle and sheep into food without slaughtering them. Peasants, it is understood, have already been ordered to take their meals with a pinch of salt. « ♦ * News that 25,000 chemists have been poring over the latest official book on medicine-making, called for long the British Pharmacopoeia, is not particularly interesting in itself. Nevertheless when we take into consideration that this production first started in 1618 the latest issue makes interesting comparison. There has been, for one thing, a fortunate tendency toward simplicity. The first prescriptions contained no less than fifty ingredients. In fact some contained over •seventy. - lu those days the pundits of the medical profession pinned their faith on crab's eyes as a cure, not to mention such delicacies as crushed pearls, oyster shells, coral, powdered mummy, pounded human skulls, and a decoction of boiled blind puppies. • • » Let us laugh until we split at the rubbish that went into the medicines that found a place in the first British Pharmacopoeia. But let our laughter not give away our ignorance. Experts to-day still carry out magic rites with the glands of apes. Moreover, these rites are no whit less complicated than the mixing of puppies’ brains 150 years ago. In company with the leading medical lights of uncivilised countries the very latest craze to-day is to isolate the hormones of wild animals and swallow the product as a cure. The only difference seems to be that the uncivilised savage did not make his extracts into pill form. While our witches of long ago said mystic incantations over cauldrons our chemists of to-day crush the oil from the liver of fishes according to set rules. They expel unseen vitamins from wheat and the organs of animal-. They resolve the pitituary and other glands to powders, and invite us to eat the product. Have we really progressed or is progress but a better understanding of the mysteries that baffled us? » ♦ * News of the death of a farmer in England who carried out his avocation for half a century, although he was totally blind, is by no means an isolated instance of the way that this disablility can be conquered. It is said that the distinction of being the first blind man to make an unaccompanied walking tour of England belongs to a Napier resident. Certainly blindness is not a bar to a man becoming a gardener. One blinded soldier has earned his keep since the war at that job. He can tell weeds by his sense of touch and has an uncanny knowledge of whether a plant is sickly or thriving. « * ■ » Probably the profession at which blind persons excel more than any is that of music. Only a couple of years ago a young inmate of the Blind Institute at Auckland topped the list in a music examination. It is on record that at one time the organist of Temple Church, London, was a blind lad only 11 years old. Those famous musicians. Wolstenhohne and Alfred Hollins, incidentally were both stone blind. Possibly the late war has caused the world to give more attention to the blind. But it is only fair to point out that at least one blind Postmaster-General in Britain carried out his duties so thoroughly that he was ultimately buried in Westminster Abbey. * ♦ ♦ The kidnapping propensities of certain monkeys in Delhi, which are in the habit of removing babies from their cradles, is not such an unusual thing as might be expected. It is a wellknown fact in Africa that it is dangerous to leave a child unattended in the vicinity of monkeys or gorillas. Moreover. baboons can rarely resist picking up a baby and taking it to their.haunts in the cliffs. There it is brought up as one of the colony. This may be proved by the numerous authenticated Tarzan stories that make truth seem far stranger than fiction. » » » Only a year ago hunters in the Drakensburg Mountains, Natal, noticed a boy playing among a ' colony of baboons. He had lived in a cave with them for some time, subsisting on raw meat, looted maize, and dead sheep. In one case a baby that had been brought up among baboons was restored to the mother after a lapse of 13 years. With infinite care the mother taught him the ways of civilised life. But to this day she has never succeeded in persuading her baboon child to eat cooked food/ or to walk erect. * * •• • Before allowing the subject of uncanny warnings to drop, a reader writes, here is another instance, this time from no less a source than the British Navy. During the war a submarine sent on listening patrol to the German coast failed to return. She was duly written off as lost. Six months later the second in com maud of another submarine found him self at the spot wuere it was thought the first submarine nad been-lost. For some reason tie looked through the peri scope. He saw the officer commanding the submarine that had. not' returned frantically waving his arms from the surface of the sea. Carried away with astonishment the second' tn command shouted, “Good heavens, there’s McGrath.”'lmmediately lie ordered the submarine to rise to the surface to save his brother officer.- As they advancefl slowly on the surface in the direction in which McGrath had been seen wav ing they found that they were making straight for a line of mines. But for the warning they would have met a similar fate to that of the first submarine. Believe it or believe it not, but that is a tale they tell to this day in the Navy. * * ♦ Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing t<> him falls early, or too late. Our acts our angels are.' or good or 111, Our fatal shadows that walk by us* still. —John Fletcher.