NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21859, 23 July 1934, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

MOTHI.RS AS MINISTERS That a married woman in the ministry of a church should have to hand in her resignation on becoming a mother, because of the hostile feeling of the congregation, was described as " perfectly monstrous" by Dr. Maude Hoyden at the annual meeting of the Society for the Ministry of Women at St. Albans, London. She was referring to the resignation of the Rev. Vera Kenmure, of Glasgow. Admitting that the first claim on a mother was that of her children, Dr. Hoyden contended that it was the mother's own right to decide whether she should place the Church or her children first. To leave it to the community generally was to treat women as children and not as adults. Motherhood was not only physical but spiritual, and on her return to the Church a minister who had become a mother would bo a more valuable person. Mrs. Kenmure resigned from Partick Congregational Church, Glasgow, last March, as the result of a section of the congregation objecting to her continuing her ministry after the birth of her baby.

INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH The importance of research in industry was emphasised at the annual luncheon of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. Sir William J. Larke said that the work of the association would possibly do more than that of any other single agency to solve the problem of unemployment. If they only estimated the influence of the research done by their association on their industry they would see that they had received in relation to expenditure thousands per cent of dividend. In the iron and steel industry, since they formed their research association, they had .probably spent less than £150,000 and had saved £1,750,000 per annum in fuel alone, which although not entirely due to that expenditure, would not have been saved without it. The Government decided that industrial research should be supported, for it was through collective research that the luxuries of to-day became the necessities of tomorrow, and so they raised the standard of life and the comfort of the whole community. It was therefore justifiable that the community should make some contribution to research which produced such great results. ANTARCTIC WHALING Professor W. J. Dakin, Professor of Zoology at the University of Sydney, stated in a Rotary Club -address that it would not be easy to draw up regulations preventing foreign companies from whaling in the Australian sectoi of the Antarctic outside the three-mile limit unless there was some kind of international agreement. The Norwegian companies were again competing strenuously against each other, and there was nothing to stop whaling on a tremendous scale except the financial situation of the different countries that needed the oil. It had been found possible during the last few years to do many things with whale oil hitherto undreamt of. The development of the industry had had a curious effect on trade in the tropics, for example. Companies which produced copra probably viewed with mixed feelings the success of whaling interests in the Antarctic, in view of the new uses to which whale oil was put. Those associated with trade in the tropics probably hoped, either that the whale would "fizzle out," or that some international restrictions would be placed upon whaling in the Antarctica in the near future. Professor Dakin said that the pecuniary advantages of whaling on a large and successful scale to the personnel of a big whaling ship were great. If such a vessel came back with whales to the value of, say, £500,000, one could readily imagine that the captain of the ship, as the director of operations, was controlling a vast enterprise. It would not be surprising, in the circumstances, if his income for a year's operations might be several thousands of pounds,,and an ordinary member of his crew made about £2OO. WORLD CLIMATE

There is a cold time coming in the next 10,000 years or so, according to Dr. G. C. Simpson, the Director of the Meteorological Office, says the Morning Post. Deserting the rule which he enforces in his own office that weather forecasts must be limited to the next 48 hours, Dr. Simpson told the Royal Meteorological Society what it would be like on the earth hundreds of thousands of years ahead. He based his prophecies on a theory of solar changes which he has lately shown to be confirmed by the story of world weather in the period covered by the last four ice ages. It is the sun's heat, he says, that changes. A complete cycle of change takes anything from 100,000 to 1,000,000 years, and the difference in radiation represents a range of about 40 per cent. "We arc at present approaching a minimum," he said, "and our climate is cold and dry. All the evidence points to the conclusion that the earth will continue to get colder, and drier for a long time yet." But even after the sun's radiation has begun to increase again, he explained, I'hirope would have to go through another ice age before we once again got really warm weather, with temperatures from odeg. to lOdeg. higher than they are now, and, no doubt, another influx of semi-tropical life. An increase in solar radiation would mean more difference in temperature between the equator and the poles. There would, therefore, be stronger winds, more cloud, and more precipitation. "At first," lie explained, "the increased precipitation would result in greater accumulation of snow, and the increased cloud would prevent summer melting The polar ice caps and the ice fields on mountains would extend, spreading into lower latitudes and down to lower heights." That would bring the next ice age to its maximum tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years hence. Then, as the sun's radiation further increased in strength, the ice would be first cheeked in its advance and finally melted. There would follow the warmest time of all, "a warm, wet, inter-glacial period," with half as much cloud again as there is now. Next, as the sun's radiation began to decrease in intensity again, the same set of changes would be reversed, and after another ice age we should drift slowly back to the status quo. We should have had two ice ages in the course of the one solar cycle, while in the tropics there would have been a single wet period corresponding with the warm, wet, inter-glacial period nearer the poles.