NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 20083, 22 October 1928, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE FACTORY CHIMNEY. "There is a widespread belief that smoke spells prosperity," says Dr. S. G. Moore, medical officer for Huddersfield, in the Yorkshire Observer. "The belief is well founded. It. is evidence that trade is going on Obviously. Hence the general attitude toward the nuisance caused by smoke. The mistake lies in the belief that the furnaces cannot function well without producing smoke, 'that is tho fallacy! That is the delusion! They can and they do, and that more economically. Smoke is unconsumed fuel. Therefore it is waste. It is money going up into the air. Consumed in a furnace it will raise steam. If manufacturers first, and workfolk second, can by any possibility writhe free from the time-worn idea that smoky chimneys spell prosperity, and allow the other idea that smokeless or nearly smokeless chimneys spell an addition to any prosperity that may be going in these hard times to remain in their minds long enough to receive adequate consideration, that will form a long step in tho direction of making England a garden, and a prosperous one to boot." BIG HEADS AND WISE HEADS. " The physical state of the brain is no more a criterion as to the quality of the intelligence than is the publisher's wrapper an indication of a book s literary value," says Mr. E. T. Burke, in the English Review. " When Anatole France died his brain was removed and examined by two celebrated anatomists. The result of the three years' investigation may be summed up in tho statement that the brain of tho great Frenchman weighed only 1017 grammes—343 grammes less than that of the average man in the street. While Anatole France, with a brain 25 per cent, below mediocrity, was writing 'Penguin Island,' many of his contemporaries with greater cerebral development were scavenging or shouting the odds on racecourses. It would seem clear from this alone that there is no relationship between brain mass and mental ability. We all know these sagaciouslooking impostors, a nod from whose massive heads should surely shake tho spheres, and wo shall continue to suffer from their fatuity so long as there exists tho fetish that wisdom varies directly : with size of head." IN DUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. " Wo stand to-day perplexed at the manifold problems which the Great War has revealed to the economist and the politician, apart from those which if has directly caused. Even to comprehend the nature of these problems demands an effort," says Mr. Sidney Webb, in a foreword to a book 011 the economic problems of Europe. "We seem fo be living in the midst of a rapidly developing transformation of industrial, financial and social relations more far-reaching ill its effects than tho industrial revolution of tho eighteenth century. This time the revolution is international and world-wide. The social historian of a hundred years hence will be better able to gauge this twentieth-century industrial revolution than those whose lives are buffeted by if. Unfortunately, tho present generation cannot wait for this future historian. For my own part I frankly avow that the new complications baffle me. 1 doubt whether tho international problems now being raised aro capable of solution by the apparatus and methods of tho nineteenth-eenturv economists. We need, if not moro brains, at least a much moro comprehensivo detailed description of tho facts than has hitherto been available. If humanity is to control and direct the forces that it has unwittingly called into activity it will require, not only moro theory, but also, alid primarily, much more knowledge as to what is actually happening."