NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21935, 19 October 1934, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

THE FAMILY FARM Professor W. G. S. Adams, Warden of All Souls, discussed the significance) of the community movement in the countryside in a paper read before the agricultural section of the British Association. In spite of the growth in the mechanisation of agriculture, and tho natural economic tendency toward larger units of production, the family farm persisted and showed great vitality, he said This was due partly to economic causes, but also largely to social reasons. He believed that even in Britain the small farm would increase and would become a more rather than a less important factor in rural community life. The reason lay in the fact .that agriculture was not only an industry and a business but a life, and the family farm, despite all the hard toil that it involved, was able largely to satisfy the human desire to be independent and self-supporting. The countryside was old in comparison with the town. It was rich in experience and in tradition, and there was an immense amount of storedup energy in its people. PREVENTION OF WAR In a speech at Geneva, Dr. Benesh, the Czecho-Slovakian Foreign Minister, said that while he had no desire to cherish illusions of interested optimism, he was also strongly opposed to any kind of interested pessimism, which usually pursued aims, opposed to the general interest. From time to time fears were expressed that war would break out; some even that war was directly hanging over their heads. War to-day was in no sense inevitable. Those who guided the world possessed to a greater extent than ever before the means to prevent it, and it was more than ever necessary to proclaim to tho world that responsibility for a war was upon the men who were responsible in their respective countries. The present was a period of internal political and social upheaval, and abnormal international relations were inevitable. But after great catastrophes a period of idealistic effort was usually followed by a period of discontent and commotion; after which the constructive forces rallied and resumed their forward march. "We might perhaps be about to enter the third period," Dr. Benesh concluded, "and might hope to be successful if we were firmly resolved to prevent war and to sustain in every way the positive and constructive forces."

SLEEP AND HYPNOSIS Dr. William Brown, Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford University, addressing the psychology spction of the British Association on "Sleep and Hypnosis," said that in spite of marked differences between the state of sleep and that of hypnosis, a clpse connection between the two states must still be recognised. Not only was sleep induced by hypnotic suggestion, even to the cure of some forms of somnambulism, but the hypnotic state itself readily passed into a state of normal sleep. Dreamless sleep was a passive state, and hypnosis a definitely active one and full of potential results, although dreams themselves might be an accompaniment of normal sleep and in their activity resemble hypnotic manifestations, while sleep-walking was a spontaneously occurring phenomenon closely analogous to what was induced in a good hypnotic subject. A person who frequently walked in his sleep was, as a rule, exceptionally easy to hypnotise, and in the hypnotic state the dreams of the somnambulist might be recalled and the abnormal condition often rectified. The simplest and most generally effectivfe method of inducing hypnosis was to get the subject to lie on a couch and fix his mind on thoughts of slumber. He might pass directly into some degree of catalepsy of the muscles, but, on the other hand, if he was instructed to relax and to breathe deeply and regularly the result was a close approximation to normal sleep, although the total state remained one of hypnosis. The subject in such a mild hvpnoidal condition was unconscious of the outside world, but acutely aware of the hypnotist, and able to concentrate intensely upon certain suggested ideas. In this way, avoiding the unnecessary phenomenon of catalepsy, access might be obtained to some of the deeper levels of nerve function, and therapeutic adjustments might be made.