CURRENT TOPICS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 13887, 23 October 1905, Page 6

CURRENT TOPICS.

!' / . “If you see ai mlthe orobe,” says a humorist BEsmncEOT in cm® of the half-penny blue-bottle, papers, “ don’t put your foot on it. It may be a benefactor of the human race.” TMa is by "way of preface to some observations on bacteria. Mr F. 0. Lewis, of Liverpool University, lecturing to the Sanitary Congress a few weeks ago, devoted an hour to dispelling the popular notion that microbes are only useful to carry diseases. He showed that brewing and bread-making, cheese and but-ter-making, and a score of such household operations, are entirely dependent on microbes for their success, and then he explained that microbes entered into every action and requirement of man’s daily life. It is, therefore, only ignorance that condemns the microbe offhand as an enemy of human kind. But popular ignorance has been unjust' to other living things than microbes. ATI these years we have been condemning the energetic and harmonious blue-bottle. Man regards it as a nuisance because it disturbs his slumber bn a. warm afternoon ; woman detests it because she has a firm conviction that it brings putrefaction to meat and disease to food generally. According to a writer in the “People’s Friend,” however, the blue-bottle is a true scavenger, endeavouring to make the world- a little cleaner and more wholesome. When we condemn the fly for “blowing” the meat, we should really, it seems, be; condemning the meat. The blue-bottle, says this authority, is blessed with a fine nose, for tainted meat, towards which it flies unerringly. Undisturbed, it lays its eggs either on dead creatures in the open air or op the odd joint in the larder. " These eggs presently hatch out into tiny, worm-like creatures, popularly known as maggots. The maggot is in reality a larva or immature blue-bottle, with, an enormous appetite for carrion. Born in the midst of decay, it proceeds immediately to devour as much of its environment a® possible until it reaches the second period of its existence, when it : becomes a pupa. Then it eats no more until, breaking out into a full-blossom-ed fly, it wings its way hither and thither, seeking in turn a suitable spot for the reception of its own eggs, which means the ultimate removal of some more animal garbage.- ft may bo true, and yet, we fear, the prejudice against tire blue-bottle is a prejudice that housewives will prefer to retain.

Some ten years ago a warm controversy raged in sports . circles in

WHAT IS AN AMATEUR P

New Zealand because the authorities of so-called amateur sports had decreed that a cyclist who raced for a money prise was a professional swimmer, as well as a professional cyclist. If it is not possible for a professional swimmer to be an amateur cyclist, it should logically be impossible for a professional journalist to be an amateur gardener, and yet thp logically impossible is the actual fact in many instances. There is the same trouble in the Old Country as in the colonies concerning the amateur definition. Quite lately, the status of Shrubb, the long-distance athletic champion, has been questioned, by the authorities. The interpretation of the rule, again, divides football England into two separate camps. In cricket the distinction used to be simple: the professional was plain Jones, the amateur Mister 0. B. Fry. Bub even in cricket it is not easy to decide why tho gentleman employed as secretary of a cricket club should be an amateur* and

the gentleman employed as ground bowler- a professional. The Australians, who presumably divide the "profits of their tour to the Mother Country, remain amateurs, But .if they engaged a bowler and guaranteed him £1 a week he would bo a professional. The definition of amateur oarsman is perhaps • the most stupid and most complicated of all. One of the rules of tho English Amateur Rowing Association declares that no man who earns his living by manual labour can be an amateur. The rule looks simple enough, but its interpretation has caused unending complexity. The captain of a company may be an amateur oarsman, but the soldier who cleans ' '■ his boots cannot. A bricklayer certainly earns his living by manual labour, but that would not make him a professional swimmer or athlete. Yet it prevents him from becoming an amateur oarsman. On the other hand, a recent decision of the Association lays it down that a draper’s assistant, although he earns his living with a roll of cloth and a yard-stick, may become a member of an amateur rowing club affiliated to the Association, and may compete in races as an amateur.

Dr Carlton Bastian is the genesis one of the few scienoe life. . tists who refuse to abandon the belief in the theory of spontaneous generation. "Writing in the “ Independent Review ” for September, he disagrees with the current evolution hypothesis. He is prepared to believe that living things have bo far only been generated from preexisting living things, but adds that this is “ absolutely devoid of all cogency in reference to the question of the de novo of living matter. The origin of living matter, like the origin of esyatals, can only take place in fluid or in semi-fluid media, and in e.ach case the initial 'molecular combinations would lie far beyond,the region of the visible.” Crystals appear in certain liquids as the smallest visible specks, and thenceforth gradually assume their own specific forms. Dr Bastian assumes that living matter may be generated in the same way. The real heresy, he assorts, is not to admit the I possibility of spontaneous generation, hut to assume, without a scrap of evidence, a break in the continuity of natural phenomena for which no reason has ever been alleged. Dr Bastian has much to say about " Axchebiosis,” a ternf h© uses to describe the formation of living matter by a process of synthesis from its primitive elements. "The living matter so arising, in tho form of minute particles, is assumed,” he says, "to speedily develop-into one or other kind of the lowest living things.” Smaller living things, may, however, originate de novo in another Way, known -as heterogenesis. This latter process is one in which the actual substance of organisms or their gertns gives rise to alien forms of.-life. Elaborating Us argument, he refers to _the present-day existence of vast mul- !. titudes of lowest organisms of all kinds. "It cannot be said,” he argues, "that such organisms have remained in this primitive state because they are comparatively unchangeable forms. The very reverse is the fact; their mutahil- . ity is well-known and admitted to be extreme.” As against the theory that all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form, ■ Dr Bastian suggests that life oidginally started from multitudes of centres, and that from the earliest stages of the earth’s history to tho present time new ■ starting points of simplest forms have been occurring all over the surface of the earth.