NEWS AND NOTES.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 13, 16 January 1909, Page 12

NEWS AND NOTES.

THE BRITISH NAVY. "Although England has a deep purse and can aftord to build more battleships than Germany, her Navy v. ill soon be hampered by a lack of sailors." This notion (writes the Berlin correspondent of The Times), which will probably surprise Englishmen, is widely held in Germany, and I myself have heard it maintained even boyond the German frontier and among classes that do not, like the l^an-tierman naval stalwarts, want to use ifc as an encouragement to weaker brethren who bogin to count the cost of the new German fleet. The Kolnische Volkszeitung, one of the most influential organs of the Centra party, which constantly advocates good relations with Great Britain, gives currency to this idea. In condemning an incendiary article by a leading Conservative, Count voii Brunnenk, who main tains that England wishes to reduce Germany as she formerly reduced Holland and Spain, to the rank of a second rate Power, and to deprive her of her influence on world policy, the Catholic organ says that almost all naval authorities are agreed that the invasion of England is only possible when the British Fleet is engaged elsewhere, as, for instance, in the case of a rebellion in India. It adds: "It would also be possible it the British Navy could no longer be manned adequately, while Germany would always have full , cvews owing to our compulsory «ervice." It may be well to remind friends as well as prospective enemies that the British Navy is not yet within measurable distance of- such a- collapse. Its supply of sailors is constantly in excess of the demand, the number oi recruits who offer themselves being, 1 believe, on an average twenty-five to thirty per cent, more than are needed. There is, therefore, little prospect" of a failure in the supply of bluejackets before 1911, which many Germans appeal to regard as a fateful year. It is strange .but true that, when Mr. Henniker Heaton, twenty-one years ago, before the Colonial Institute, advocated Imperial penny postage, one of the postal officials who declared such i thing impracticable was Mr. Pearson Hill, son of the late Sir Rowland Hill. As quoted by Mr. Heaton at the meeting of 10th November last, he said : "M*. Henniker Heaton proposes that postage should be reduced to a uniform rate of one penny between this country and the colonies, and tries to strengthen his argument by instancing the success which attende.l the introduction ot the universal penny postage system into this country forty-eight years ago. Now, I think "Mr. Henniker Heaton fails to understand — probably ho has never heard the reason — why a uniform penny postage was practicable in this country, but is impracticable beyond." Said Mr. Heaton : "The 'impracticable' proposal was carried, and bioughi/ into operation on Christmas Day, 1898, ten years afterwards — and we have not lost a farthing by it." The London traffic branch of the Board of Trade, appointed in August, 1907, has issued its first annual report, which contains -many interesting details It states that the controlling power secured by the Underground Electric Railways Company over three of the other tube railways has been a great public convenience, and that an extension of the principle would be exceedingly desirable. Through bookings all over London would then be possible. Finally, the recommendation that there should be a permanent Traffic Board for London is reconfirmed. "Has England wronged Ireland?" asks Mr. Gold win Smith in the Nineteenth Century. He deplores the fact that "Irish history, in all that relates to the conduct of England to Ireland, is perverted to the service of hatred" : "England," he says, "is charged with things which belong to the account of the Normans, the Papacy, or the general convulsion of Europe." He quotes Guizot in 1866, who said : "The conduct of England to Ireland for the last thirty years has been admirable," and runs over most of Irish history to extract the thorn of injustice to England. He ends by hoping that Royalty will visit Ireland more frequently and so improve Irish feeling. The Rodin bust of Whistler is almost ready. The sculptor is to have JBSOO for his work, and £450 of that amount is already in hand. The work has given great satisfaction in Paris ; so much so in fact that a replica is to be subscribed for that city, and also a second for New York. A man in a bank at Piccadilly, with an accent that was not of London, |rew several bank-notes. Then he annexed a chair ; he took off his left boot ; he placed his bank-notes in the sole of that boot, and having laced the boot again, he walked out with his money fairly safe from the London thief. Major-General Bullock, who has just relinquished the command of the British forces in Egypt, has had a distinguished and exciting career. It was Colonel Bullock, as he was then, of the Devons_, who in the "donga of death" at Colenso positively refused to surrender, and fought hand-to-hand with the enemy who had come to take possession of the littlo remnant left behind without orders to retire, it was Colonel Bullock also who got a little bit of his own back again at Honing Spruit. De Wet came swooping down on a band of four hundred released prisoners) who were without guns, and armed only with old Martinis and ammunition inclined to jam. He shelled them with a 15-pounder, a 12-pounder, and a 9-pounder, at a range of a thousand yards,- but Bullock was in command, and there was no surrender. • In the end De Wet had to retire, and has said in his book that, in spite of "its name, Honing Spruit has never again seemed sweet to him. For his services in the war General Bullock received the C.B. Chemists have again - been discussing the cause of the rusting of iron. Several months ago Dr. Moody astonished a sceptical world with the announcement that pure iron would not rust in pure water or even m puro oxygen moistened with water. His position was attacked again and again, but he repeated his experiments, making them even more cogent than before, and the Chemical Society acknowledged the correctness of his deductions. Dr. Moody's original worlr has started several other observers on similar lines, and the conditions under which iron will cr will not rust are being vigorously discussed. The general position at present seems to be that it is unorthodox to believe that iron will rust in the absence of some body that will act as v, conductor of electricity. The •discussions have brought out pevernl interesting points. Pure iron dipping into puro .vater and pure oxygen will not rust, but rust is rapidly formed if the irou ia ullowed to rest agninst the glass of the vessel in which the water is contained. The effect- is said to be due to formation of ini~-«.e quantities of silicic acid as a result of contact between the metal and the glass. The question of iron rusting h one of great interest, because, as the formation of rust is a process of combustion, rusting should conform to the general law of chemical j change, that ie cau only occur under r similar conditions to those obtaining in , a galvanic eell — that is to say, in the presence oi an electrolyse-

Much has been written of the dogs of Constantinople, but nothing so astonishing as some observations by Mr. H C. Woods in his book of travel, " Washed by Four Seas." "A well-known man in Pera" (he writes) '" told me he had been escorted home from dinner by dogs. The king of earh pack in turn, accompanied him through his domain, and handed him over to his neighbour at his boundary, as, of course, to pass his welldefined limit wa.s forbidden to any chieftain, however stiong." Pet dogs are looked at askance by the street dogs. A deg living in Constantinople may, however, walk out alone in his own street after he once becomes known, and may even leave his street unmolested to proceed to some othw particular destination when accompanied by his master, provided he is Known to be a constant passer-by on the particular route." There has just died in the village of Overtown, near Wishaw, N. 8., James Shaw, a working-man who had an extraordinary reputation as an eye specialist. He was originally a colliery engineman, and workmen used to resort to him in large numbers. Indeed, many thousands of people were successfully treated by him, operations ranging from the removal of the aimple "fire" in the workman's eye to the healing of the most serious affection. On one occasion a man travelled all the way from New Zealand and had his eye put right by Mr. Shaw. Up till his death he continued to despatch weekly large quantities of his special preparations, for which there were appl Jj-itions from all parts of the globe. \vhen Mr. Shaw celebrated his golden wedding a year ago the occasion was taken to acknowledge his long services by presenting hiir with a public testimonial. King Edward (says a Home paper} showed openly how keenly he ielt the importance of carrying on a splendid tradition when he visited Eton. The memorial building, which will for ever enshrine the names of the Etonians who perished in South Africa, is a beautiful structure, worthy of the dead boys. Out of 1400 who were in the war Eton had 138 lose their lives. One seldom has an opportunity of seeing so fine a- spectacle as that made by the mass of boys who faced the King on Wednesday, and the throng of famous men beside them, from Earl Roberts downwards. The interior of the hall is decorated in pure white, and is remarkably graceful with it.s loftyarched roof. The memorial ode by Mr. Bridges is a fine one, and Sir Hubert Parry has set it to grand music from the opening with its Eton volunteer corps "call" and "assembly" to the end. • The King read his speech in reply to the boys' address with deep feeling, and his voice rang through Che hall, as he spoke of, "the example of those brave men." Dr. Sven Hedin (the Simla coi respond- | ent of The Times reports) delivered a private lecture to-day on his discoveries m Tibet. He emphasised the great strength of the Himalayas as a natural defensive barrier of India, but his^ explorations, he said, showed a further barrier in the immense Trans-Himalayan range with difficult parallel chains to the north. He testified to the courtesy and kindness of the Tibetans, and said that though little was left in the way of geographical discoveries, yet geologically much remained to be done. Dr. Sven Hedin calculates that two or three years will be required to work up the mass ot information which he has collected relating to tracts hitherto unknown to Europeans. Rats, according to Sir James Crichton Browne, were in a great measure responsible for the spread of the recent plague in India, which cost 2,000,000 lives. And they did damage in Great Britain, addaJ Mr. Boelter, secretary of the Vermin Destruction Society, estimated at £15,000,000 a year, while their depredations in the United States and Germany co.st each year £20,000,000 and £10,000,000 respectively. "It is extraordinary what losses Ilia Roman Church ln>s incurred by her indulgence in. the dogma-making instinct," writes Mr. Schiller in the Hibbert Jour nal. "Was a disagreement about th?. calculating of that most inconveniently migratory festival, Easter, worth the bisection and peimanent weakening of Christendom? Was the defining of the Trinity and the Incarnation worth the loss of Africa and Asia to Mohammedanism, and the destruction of the best of the Northeners, the Avian Goths? The world in all probability would long ago have been Christian, the Roman Church would have bean tiuly 'Catholic,' but for the disastrous practice oi defining dogmas, and the intolerance of which this was the cause and the effect." Bui, there is something to be said on tho other side. The same criticism, in varying degree, applies to every denomination ; for even the most tolerant is compelled to draw the line somewhere. Joachimsthal, near Carlsbad, whero radium baths are to de established, is already histoiic as the biithplace of the original dollar. An authority in the London Chronicle says this was the silver guldengroschen, coined in 1519 by order of Count Schlick from the metal of a recently opened mine, and it became known as the Joachimslhaler, or "thaler"' alone for short. - Before 1600 the nimble English language had already made " dollar "of this Thereafter this name was loosely used of all manner of coins varying in value from three to fiive shillings, and belonging to all manner of countries, from Sweden- to Japan Jt was from the prevalence of the Spanish " dollar "■ in -the British American colon ies at the time of their revolt that the modern almighty dollar was derived, while in England very modem slang has given the mime to the crown piece. Following the lead of Oregon, and the other seven or eight States of America that have legislatively recognised the principle of the initiative and referendum, the State of Maine recently adopted a constitutional amendment establishing the principle m al) iStalr. legih. latiou. The amendment provides that no legislative enactment shall becomo operative until ninety days after its passage, and in the meantime a petition of ten thousand voters may postpone the measure for consideration by the whole of the electors at the ensuing general election. Any specific Bill may be submitted to the Legislature if twelve thousand voters petition for its submission. If the proposed measure is ro jectod by the Legislature, the same petitioners may demand a ful l vote of the electors on it at the general election One of Uipso days wo may actually possess a "British East African iino of bteamers (writes a London shipping paper). For .years the do-ii'.ibilitv of encouraging btich a service has been urged upon the Government, with barrr-n results. iforLunaloly there are signs that the fire of arguments is at length taking effect. Recently the official altitude towards this important question has undergone a marked change. In faot, the Undor-Secrotary for Iho Colonies has said that "'his Majesty's Government >vas anxious to soeuro as soon q& possible an improved of BrilisK tlprmibhips with I'itj Ka-t African coast, and negotiations were in progress on the Eiibiect." Yon make preparations for a rainy clay, then why not lor a cold or atta< k of influenza': You don't nend to maka costly preparations — merely invest Is, 6d in a'bottlo of Chamberlain's Cough Remedy. — Advfc.