NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19981, 25 June 1928, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

TAXATION OF BETTING. The attempt to tax betting with bookmakers in Britain has, acording to the Observer, resulted in a * successful and notorious evasion oil an enormous scale. The Daily Mail states that although 15,000 bookmakers have been registered the taxes paid amounted to only £2,669,000, which represents the levy ou £94,000,000, whereas the betting turnover is believed to be £800,000,000. It declares, that there is an evasion of the duty which rivals that when smuggling was at its height and lias probably never been exceeded in the history of taxation. It attributed this evasion to the operation by a large body of bookmakers and some professional backers of a secret clearing house, and the methods employed ha\ e been explained by tho Daily News. An arrangement has been reached between the parties concerned that all bets made in pounds should be recorded on the bookmaker's ledgers as in shillings, it states. " The bets clearing house deals with the surplus. At the day of settling the punter may have won £IOO. This is shown as a hundred shillings, and the bookmaker sends him a cheque for £5. Then ho instructs tho clearing house to meet a demand by the punter for £95. On tho other hand if the punter loses £IOO ho sends a cheque to the bookmaker for £5. Then he forwards the £95 to the clearing house, by which it is sent to tho bookmaker. The transactions made by the clearing house are all in cash, and the loss to the revenue is impossible to trace." REGENERATION OF THE THEATRE. Writing of tho theatre in Britain after tho war, in an article in the New York Herald Tribune. Mr. St. John Ervine attributes the degeneration of the stage to the rise to affluence of persons who, while they possessed all the means of leading a cultured life, had not got the mentality for it. " These uncouth, rich persons swarmed into the expensive seats of the theatres and, because of their money, laid dowu the law about the sort of entertainment that should be provided for them," he says. " Many educated persons, because they found themselves unable to control the choice of entertainment, could no longer afford to pay for the reserved seats and, since they declined to stand in queues for the cheaper ones, withdrew from the theatre altogether. So it was delivered over to the mindless, the vapid, the ignorant, the hysterical and the illbred. And as the audience was, so the play became. The signs of returning health, however, aro everywhere observable. The educated public was not content to be deprived of its drama altogether. The repertory theafres, which had almost been ruined by the outbreak of the war, were re-formed; groups of persons formed themselves into play-read-ing and play-producing societies; and in a remarkably brief time an audience was re-assembled for better stutff than we had had in the theatre for nearly ten years. Suddenly, and to the utter astonishment of all the quidnuncs of the theatre, Mr. Bernard Shaw's ' Saint Joan' was performed in a West End theatre and became a great, popular success, while his earlier works filled provincial theatres which, before, would have been emptied by them. That moment was the turning time in the English theatre, and we are now well on the way toward health. When the cost of production has been brought within the range of reason, I do not doubt that the English theatre will flourish again as bravely as it ever flourished." THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD. Three hundred years ago William Harvey, an English physician, and perhaps the greatest name in English medicine, published his discovery of the circulation of tho blood. Tho final argument by which Harvey convinced his critics has been recalled by Dr. Charles Singer, in the Nation. " Harvey, early in his work, perceived that the valves in the veins would permit the blood to pass only toward the heart, while those at the root of the great arteries arising from the heart would permit the blood to pass only away from the heart," he writes. " Now, in connection with the movement ot the blood Harvey s crucial point is that it must be always in one direction, and, moreover, on account of the continued beat of tho heart, also continuous. This really clinches the matter; for consider the capacity ol the heart. Let us suppose thai either ven-> tricle holds but two ounces of blood. Tho pulse beats 72 times a minute, and 60 times 72 an hour, fn the course of one hour, therefore, the left ventricle will throw into tho aorta, or the right ventricle into the pulmonary artery, no less than 86400z. of blood, which is moro than three times the body weight of a heavy man. Whence can all this blood come ? Whither can it all go ? It cannot come from the ingested food and drink, for no one could consume so much in one hour! It cannot reach and remain in the tissues, for they would soon all burst and ooze with blood! The solution of the puzzle, Harvey came to see, is that it is the same blood that is always being pumped into the arteries, and the same blood that is always coming back through the veins. In other words, the blood circulates. We may say that the knowledge of the circulation of the blood has been the basis of the whole modern development of the science of physiology. Without a knowledge of tho circulation we should have no clear conception of the mechanics, physics, and chemistry of the animal body. The whole of scientific medicine is based o\ this mechanics, physics, and chemistry, and thus, ultimately, on our knowledge of the circulation."