NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18941, 12 February 1925, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

AMERICAN HOMES. . " A house with two servants in America is better kept both as regards the service of meals and the orderliness of the rooms than a house with five in England," says Miss Rebecca West in the New Republic. " The American home is not maintained in its perfection like the French home by any policy of immolation of the female on tho altar of domesticity and exclusion of the stranger. The American woman is far less tied to her home, than the Englishwoman. She will, be out of her house af eleven, not to do the shopping, but to hear some lecture on current affairs or foreign policy; she will stay out all day till half-an-hour before dinner, and then preside over a dinner party that looks as if she must have spent all day concentrating on its perfection. And her homo is constantly flooded by the high tides of her hospitality. She loves to fill it with guests and give them a ' gay party.' And her hospitality is real. It is not merely a desire for social display, it is a genuine and beautiful desire to give happiness on one's hearth. Strangers who meet one in the train and know nothing of one save that she is a foreigner travelling in a strange land, entertain her as lavishly as hostesses who are under the delusion that she is a celebrity.'"

WALKING TO HEALTH. "Walking, rightly considered, is ari art. It is a great misfortune that, as far as civilised mankind is concerned, it has become a lost ait. It deserves reviving," writes J. Ellis Barker in the Sunday Pictorial. "The muscles of our body serve a two-fold purpose. They enable us to move about and they have the most important function of regulating the so-called metabolism, the conversion of food into flesh and blood on the one hand and the excretion of wasto material and poisons on the other hand. Besides, they fulfil a. most important task in regulating our temperature. They are indeed the enginesof the human body. Walking gives the most natural, and therefore the best, exercise not only to the legs, but to practically the entire body. The muscles of the back and of the abdomen, which play a most important part in our digestive system, are used together with the legs. The activity of heart and lungs is powerfully stimulated. The blood courses more quickly through the body and through the brain. The body draws on its reserves. It absorbs superfluous fat and the reserves of food stored in the liver and elsewhere. Hence walking clears the body and the brain. It increases the appetite, improves the digestion and gives us a healthy skiu and a rosy complexion."

SCIENCE AND WEALTH. " I am personally profoundly convinced that of all the instruments now in existence for the material betterment of mankind, science and the application of science arc incomparably the greatest," said the Ear) Balfour, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, speaking at the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Leeds. " An immense amount of contention, embittered controversy, and violent party feeling, are aroused with regard to the distribution of material wealth. But, however important those controversies may be and doubtless are, unquestionably the production of wealth is a more fundamental issue: than the distribution of wealth, and the production of wealth or the increased production of wealth per capita, which is the point, can only be the product of judiciously applied science. If the application of science is to be the direct source of material amelioration of the lot of man, science it-self, the acquisition of knowledge, cannot be pursued effectively in the spirit of wealth acquisition. If you are to have applied science, you must have pure science, because applied science is only the particular use to which pure science is devoted, .and you will never get pure science to be that; it may be you will never get knowledge really furthered effectively until those who try to further it are animated wholly—perhaps wholly is too strong, but influenced in the main—not by the material gains to themselves or others which the knowledge they acquire is going to produce, but by the joy of augmenting knowledge in itself. But he who pursues pure science for itself, is, so far as my observation goes, not often a richly-rewarded member of the community. His name lives, indeed, in history. The most undying fames are the fames of those who havo initiated some great and fertile discovery, have opened a new vista of knowledge, have introduced us into a wholly-undreamt-of territory, but while their spiritual reward has been great, their material regard is not usually overwhelming in its magnitude. And they have to be content, and they may well be content, with the admiration and the gratitude of posterity,"