CURRENT TOPICS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XCVI, Issue 11049, 29 August 1896, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

THOUGHT PHOTOGRAPHY.

There died at Aysgarth, a in the north of England, remarkable on June 14,a woman known centenarian. as Betty Webster, who had attained the unusual age of 106 years. This truly matriarchal lady, maintained her faculties, including a clear and unclouded memory, up to the very close of her long life. She remembered hearing people talk of the great victory of Waterloo, immediately after that historic event, and could name men from her part of the country who served in the British army. on that occasion. Not being highly educated, she took but little interest in political or other large questions, so that her memories, of olden times were largely confined to domestic and local occurrences.- As showing the tenacityof her recollection of early events, she distinctly remembered being christened when four years of age. She could forget too, when it suited her, for when a grandson mischievously asked her if she remembered thinking half a bottle of wine on her 105th birthday the old dame would not deign to reply, and when the question was repeated protested that there was no need to make j an awful fuss about that. It must not be inferred from this that Betty was wont to indulge in high living. Her old age was attained in fact partly from inheriting a ■ a tendency to longevity and partly by abstemious and frugal living. Her father was about a hundred years old when hq died, and. she had, two uncles who each

exceeded the century. She was aam all womari. and of slender build. Her maiden name was Alderson, and she was married at the age of twenty-four. In her youth jshe was employed as a factory girl, and later as a milkmaid. She had eight children, and her surviving descendants at the date of her own death numbered seventyone. * These included a daughter aged seventy - seven, a son aged seventy, twenty - four grandchildren, forty great-grandchildren and five greatgreat - grandchildren, the youngest of whom was only two months old. The centenarian seems to have been highly esteemed by a wide, circle of friends, and on her one hundredth birthday she received the Congratulations of the Queen. She was of a pious disposition and could read her Bible up till she was a hundred years oM, when her eyesight failed. Though a Primitive Methodist she occasionally attended the Church of England, -and had the honour of having her burial service conducted by a Methodist and three Anglican clergymen. For the last four years of her life Mrs Webster had resided with a daughter. Prior to that she had lived alone, and had done all her own work. It will be rather disconcerting to the anti-tobacconists to learn that during the last forty years of her life the old lady was an appreciative and pretty extensive smoker.

pastor bibc; AND HIS MISSION.

“ Churchdom and the !H Masses” formed the subject of an address which ‘ Pastor Birch recently de-

livered at San Francisco to a conference of Presbyterian clergymen. Some of his remarks are worthy of reproduction, as showing the catholicity of spirit of the preacher, and his recognition of the rights of our common humanity. He hinted at the false position into which the Christian Church has drifted when he said:-—“Were we in direct touch with the multitude, would not ‘ the common people hear us gladly ?’ In our, preaching, while leaving the details to others, should we not insist on the principle that it is one’s duty to endeavour to lift off burdens from the oppressed?” And he by implication urged the duty of the Church to help on all just and humane political movements when he went on to declare: —“ Since our Father has not given the earth to monopolisers of land, but to the children of men, the inference is that every honest toiler has a God-given. right to a living wage, a decent home in which to eat and sleep and a pension when too old to work. .Higher schools and colleges should be open to the poorest pupil if he possesses genius, and provision ought to be %ade for his board and clothes at the national cost. And, surely, the American mother shouldhave.au equal voice with the hoodlum and tramp in saying who shall make laws for her child.” There is a good deal of sound sense here, and if Mr Birch can succeed in imbuing iis clerical brethren in America with these ideas, and in arousing them to action, the result may he such an awakening of the public'conscience in the United States as would lead the best people to take a more lively interest in political affairs, and do much to redeem public life from the vices that have crept in on account of popular apathy.

THE DRIFT TO THE CITIES.

While the population of France is almost stationary, Paris keeps growing at a rapid rate. Berlin has, during the last decade.

grown more rapidly than any other city on the face of the globe. In the United States of America the drift of population to the large cities is as pronounced, and much more portentous than it is in the Old World. The British Vice-Consul at Chicago, commenting recently on this phenomenon in the course of a report, made the following remarks:—"The startling statement is made on good authority that in the four great agricultural States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and lowa half the townships were less populous in 1890 than in 1880, while the large cities had greatly increased in size. There was a corresponding diminution of the number of productive enterprises carried on in rural districts. The result is abandoned farms on the one hand, and overcrowded trades in the cities on the other; and also an

increase in the cost, of food through diminished production, and a lowering of • wages through over-competition.” The official quoted goes on to state the reasons assigned for this state of things, such as the unremunerative nature of farming pursuits and the oppression of railway companies ; but these cannot do more than partially explain a tendency that is general, and is not confined to any particular country. An American authority lately gave some startling illustrations of the results of congested city life. Professor G. Stanley Hall states that by careful individual study he found that 60 per cent of the six-year-old children attending the schools of Boston had never seen a robin, 18 per cent had never seen a cow, some thinking a cow to be as big as their thumb, thus making mere verbal cram of all instruction received about milk, cheese, butter, leather, &c. Seventy per cent had never seen growing corn or potatoes, primers generally presuppose, the percentage of ignorance of Nature was such as to give pathos to the idea of some that good • people when they die go to the country.” In New* Zealand, Nature has favoured us so far by making us of necessity live far apart and follow rural pursuits to a large' extent, but even here our urban population grows in a more rapid ratio than the rural. By means of cheap railway excursions for school children, our town-bred children are saved from the deplorable ignorance shown by those of Boston; but, in all probability, the same excursions, by bringing country children into temporary contact with the allurements of town life, may intensify the tendency of humanity to flock together. It is vain to fight against a world-wide tendency of the human race, but as there are many evils associated with city life, it ought to be the aim of legislative and social reformers to minimise those evils by creating industrial and other conditions in towns that will tend to the preservation of health and morality.

The “new photography” has been eclipsed by a newer, of which the apostle is a certain Dr Baraduc.

This gentleman, in a paper read before the Paris Academie do Medicine, claimed to ■ have photographed thought, and produced numerous photographs in proof of his assertion. The person whose thought is to be photographed enters a dark room, places his hand on a photographic plate, and thinks intently of the object the image of which he wishes to be produced. Nay, further, it is contended that such photographs can be produced by willpower exercised over a considerable distance of intervening space. Dr Baraduc tells that an experimenter. Dr Istrate, went to sleep at Campna, at a distance of about 300 kilometres from Bucharest, but before closing fiiseyea he willed all his might that his

image should appear on the photographic plate of his friend, and a cloudy image resembling the profile of a man was the result. The London correspondent of the Melbourne Age has seen some specimens of the so-called “ thought photography,” and declares that they are not particularly convincing. Examined by transmitted light, it is just possible to see the very feeble impression of a human form, a'nd so little defined that it distinctly assists your investigations if someone will point out, at the beginning, which is the tip of the nose, or which is the outline of the beard. They are not a quarter as striking, he says, as the “spirit forms” which were produced by the Glasgow medium, Duguid, on the plates exposed and developed by the late Mr Traill Taylor, and which thoroughly “ converted ” the hard-headed editor of the “British Journal of Photography.” But Dr Baraduc’s experiments were interesting, because they involved a new theory, and not one which, like the spiritual theory, has been discredited by endless exposures. It seems probable that the alleged discovery has no real value, even as a scientific curiosity. The passion for provoking wonder, and that peculiar selfdeception which mystics invariably practise, are quite enough, without looking for sordid motives to explain away the marvels of thought photography. Probably nothing would have been heard of Dr Baraduc’s experiments and theories but for the fact that French jealousy eagerly seized upon and magnified them by way of dimming the lustre of Professor Rontgen’s discovery of the X rays.