CORRESPONDENCE

Evening Star, Issue 16051, 1 March 1916, Page 8

CORRESPONDENCE

Every letter must be accompanied by the name and address of the writer, not necessarily for ■publication, but as a guarantee of good faith. Rejected letters cannot be returned under any circumstances -whatever. HOTEL DRINKING GLASSES. TO THE EDITOR. Sir,—l must frankly 'admit "Disgusted" has made a good case, because since Saturday I have made it my business to note the methods of various barmen and barmaids in washing orrinsinc their i glasses. A leading hotel in the City has j small wooden tubs, capacity about 2gal, ■ and into this tub is thrown 'all the dregs ! from the glasses. The attendants pick up j three or four glasses at one time, dip them I quickly into this mixture, placing them in a convenient spot on the counter preparatory to drying them. A rush comes—no drying; the glasses are snatched up, filled; and -the same process is repeated time and again. Very few hotels have drainage from their bars, the glasses being washed under the counter out of sight, in the "don't care" manner detailed bv " Disgusted." I would suggest- that a committee be sat up to report on the best method of doing away with this evil, as the community must be spared the possibility of an outbreak of infantile paralysis, "such as the Swiss epidemic of 1911, such committee to consist of the drainage engineer, chairman of the Licensing Bonch, city engineer, and Dr Champtaloup, and their report embodied in the by-laws regulating all such matters of sanitation benefiting the community, and in particular an exhaustive inquiry into the possibility of the hotel drinking glasses as a carrier. G. Searl has no doubt suffered a hardship. If a metal-lined sink is a necessity at his place of business, it seems not a few publicans should be proceeded against for using portable wooden tubs.—l am, etc., „ Health. February 29. [Correspondence closed.—Ed. .E.S.] PROFESSOR ERNST HAECKEL. TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —In Saturday's issue of your paper several distinguished Jewish ' clergymen have .more or less condemned Haeckel's materialistic teachings, and possibly Dr | Schulman gets at the kernel of the matter j when he wrote: " It, is Haeckel's gods that ; have been swept away, and not the God |of Judaism and Christianity." It will bo | within the memory of your readers that j Haeckel, with several other distinguished ! German professors, including Rudolph | Eucken, signed a document to the effect that ! our present crisis was England's war. Howover, it is quite unnecessary at tliis stage to say that truth and history tell another story. Ernst Haeckel once wrote a scientific volume entitled The Riddle of the Universe,' and although published several years ago a passage in the same work makes interesting reading in the light of events to-day, and the author—a distinguished professor at Jena University—unconsciously, perhaps, gives us a true picture of the German Emperor as he is. Says Haeckel: "Eminent men often take more after their grandparents than their parents, even in the finer shades of psychic activity, in tho possession of certain artistic talents or inclinations, in force of character, and in warmth of temperament. Not infrequently there is a striking feature which neither parents nor grandparents possessed, but which may be traced a long wav back to an older branch of the family. Even in these remarkable cases of atavism the same laws of heredity apply to the ' psyche' and to the physiognomy, to the personal quality of the sense organs, muscles, skeleton, and other parts of the body. We can trace them most clearly in reigning dynasties and in old families of the nobility, whose conspicuous share in the life of the State has given occasion to a more careful historical picture of the individnals in the chain of generations—for instance, in the Hohenzollerns, the Princes of Orange, the Bourbons, etc., and in the Roman Cajsars."— I am, etc., Elliott Standfleld. March 1. 'A DREAM KICK.' TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —Under the above heading yon reprint, in Saturday's issue, an interesting letter which appeared in the 'Psychic Gazette,' telling how a young farmer had dreamt he received a severe kick on the cheek from a pony. Be awoke from the shock, and found his face bleeding from an ugly scar exactly the shape of a portion or a horse's shoo. The writer of the letter asks for an explanation of the strange Lncidanfc. It has been suggested that the dreamer was a somnambulist, and was walking in his sleep, and so actually did receive the kick which made the wound. But if, as stated in the letter, he woke up in bed, this explanation cannot be accepted as the true one. lam inclined to think that the only theory which will unlock the mystery is" the theory that an idea raised in the mind with sufficient force will out-picture on the, body. The man believed he was kicked .in his dream; he felt the kick; the conviction was a deep and strong one. His mind accepted it as true, and the belief became ait' actuality. It was imaged forth upon the physical organism. Verily, great is the power of the imagination.' There is a moral to the story, or I should not trouble you to find space for these remarks. That moral is that if we do not wish conditions to manifest in our bodies we should rigorously exclude them from our thoughts "As a man thinketh . . . so is he." There is considerable alarm in Auckland just now over the spread of infantile paralysis. Whatever be the origin of this shocking disease, I feel suTe that, like all epidemics, it is spread by the fear of it. "The thing that I feared is come upon me," said Job; and that is true to-day just as much as in the days when that remarkable poem was penned by some ancient philosopher who was trying to solve the mystery of suffering. There is an Eastern legend of a traveller going towards a plague-infested city and meeting the spirit of the plague coming out of one of the gates' The traveller accused the plague spirit with causing the death of 5,000 victims. The reply was: "I only killed 1,000. Fear slew the rest." If we were half as zealous in eradicating thoughts of fear, worry, and disease as we are in finding out so-called deadly germs, we would be better in mind and body, and bequeath to our children not such curses as infantile paralysis and the thousand-and-one ills to which flesh is supposed to bo heir, but the blessings abounding health, strength, and courage. i —l am, etc., Truth. | March 1.