IN THE PAPERS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIV, Issue 1188, 10 December 1924, Page 11

IN THE PAPERS.

Counsel: Now, sir, perhaps you will give me a straightforward answer to the simple question whether the plaintiff was trying to pass between the motor bus and the taxi or between the taxi and the lorry, and whether, if and when you saw him, lie was near either or any two and which of them respectively.”

The explosion of a pipe into which a cartridge had found its way with the tobacco; a wound from the fin of a fish; an eye shade catching fire; a peck from a pet rooster held m the lap; a jab in the eye from the horn of a cow —these are some of the causes of 279 serious eye accidents reported to the American national Committee for the Prevention of Blindness in one month.

Experiments made by a French scientific woman on the food, value of oysters have shown that the oyster possesses the highest known proportion of that wonderful digestive principle called a vitamine. That is, in the animal world; for lemons possess it in just the same proportion. This scientist first tried oysters as a cure for scurvy on guinea pigs, and the little creatures never had the disease again. Now oysters are to be fed to human patients suffering from scurvy.

Perches have been fixed on St. Catherine's lighthouse. Isle of Wight, for the benefit of birds during the migratory season, Extraordinary' sights are witnessed every year by the keepers of lighthouses, for the brilliant glare attracts enormous flocks. As the monster flaming spoke swings round the birds, evidently blinded by the glare, dash with such lury against the glass panes of the lantern as to flutter to the floor of tlie gallery with broken necks and wings, while large numbers, dazed or killed, fall into the water.

Prediction that the majority of surgical operations in future will be performed while the patient is conscious was made before a recent medical convention in America. By ‘‘blocking” the nerve group that controls the part of the body to be operated upon through the agency of a local anaesthetic, it was said that pain would bo eliminated without the necessity of putting the patient to sleep. Considerable research work in nerve blocking lias already been done, and certain major operations have already been performed.

The New York Sun, in a special dispatch from Washington, reports the accidental discovery there of a network ot underground tunnels supposed to have been used by German spies during the war. The tunnels, which constitute a veritable labyrinth, run underneath the fashionable section of the capital, and their discovery was made when a heavily-laden lorry collaxised through a part of the roadway. German newspapers of fill S were found pasted on the walls, and it is deduced that the tunnels were used as meeting places and means of communication by German spies. Should the French Minister of Finance want precedents for his proposed tax on appearances he will find some in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, where the visitor quickly learns that his host is shy of exhibiting fine pictures on his walls, for the more refined and rich the trappings of liis cottage the heavier the taxes. His neighbours, transformed for the time being into officials, visit his house to fix in the casual Jersey fashion how much he ought to pay. They arrive at appraisement by furtive glances at the appearances of wealth, and on these appearances the charge is made. Bolsheviks fall back on the same easy plan.