GENERAL NEWS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15482, 13 December 1913, Page 5 (Supplement)

GENERAL NEWS.

. JUDGE AND HATPIN DANGERS. "If a lady chooses to carry in her hat a dangerous instrument like a hatpin without a guard, and injures anyone with it, she must be held responsible," said Judge .Harrington at \ Wandsworth County Court recently, in awarding £3 damages to an elderly lady whose face had been pierced by a hatpin worn by a young lady employed in the post office, during a crush to get on an omnibus at Hammersmith Broadway. Defendant had previously said she thought hatpins were always dangerous, but if people would -push when in a crowd they must take the consequences. She added that she had had dozen of pinguards, but they all came off. His Honour said she might put a cork on them. EXCITEMENT ON A ROOF. Exciting scenes were witnessed in Whitechapel one Saturday afternoon recently, when a weak-minded man named John' Smith, aged forty, escaped from the male receiving ward of the South Grove Workhouse, and, mounting the roof of the porter's lodge, hurled the tiles at all and sundry who appeared below. Smith has been an in-and-out inmate of the workhouse for over twelve months. Some few months ago he lost his temper and broke fourteen panes of glass with his fists and boots at Whitechapel. On the afternoon in question he was deaf to all efforts at .persuasion, and the hurtling tiles followed one another in swift succession. A large crowd soon collected and a number of ; police arrived on the scene, but they were all alike helpless until the workhouse of- : ficials bethought them of the fire-hose. | This damped -Smith's clothes but not his 1 spirit- Finally a fire-escape was brought into requisition, and he was induced to come to the ground and was taken back into the workhouse. \ .

SIGNALLING TO MARS. M. Le Coultre, the distinguished Swiss astronomer who is' at the head. of the Geneva Observatory, has just made public his researches concerning the planet Mars, . which he has been studying for the last ! five years. Although very reserved in ; his language, there is little doubt that he , thinks that the Martians have been sig- | nalling to the earth. During his long i observations— nights were thus spent ; in 1909— Le Coultre observed a series I of "luminous apparitions" of a bluish | white colour resembling the light of I powerful electric arc lamps or searchlights. At first these lights appeared for seconds and then disappeared, but in the following weeks the intervals lasted minutes, and were always from the same spots. During the past six or seven years the same lights have been seen by astronomers in different parts of the world, who have put them down to atmospheric or volcanic origin. Mi Le Coultre does not agree with this theory. He will continue his researches from January next on the summit of the Saleve, 4200 ft high, above Geneva, where a new observatory has just been completed.

"MOONBLINK" VICTIMS. Beware of sleeping in (he moonlight if you wish to avoid " moonblink." Moonlight and romance are, according to tradition, almost inseparable. But moonlight sometimes claims its own victims, and they are then said to be suffering from : the imromantic affection known as "moonblink." That is the name given to a temporary blindness said to be due, according to the Lancet, to sleeping in the moonlight of tropical climates. The writer adds that there is even quoted a "death the cause of which was officially stated to be exposure to moonlight. A London doctor asked for his opinion said: —"Though I have never heard of a person befoming insane or dying from exposure to the light of the moon, I do know that some persons'become more excited and very romantic at the times when the moon is either new or full. It is a ■ singular fact that in asylums lunatics ! have to be supplied with extra doses of medicine to soothe their nerves at these periods of the moon's age." Another i doctor, however ,held a different view :— , "It is just as safe to sleep under the '.moonlight," he'said, "as it is to sleep j anywhere else. The whole thing I regard I as mere superstition/'