NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21938, 23 October 1934, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

AMERICA'S INFLUENCE Sir Josiah Stamp, speaking to the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce on tli* effect of American recovery on British ,trade prospects, said that the general outlook had slightly improved since in June ho had drawn attention to the distinct slackening in the rate of recovery. Improvement began to be definite in early July, but although welcome and distinct, it was not very great and the course ahead was by no means free from difficulty. Serious industrial trouble in any area could easily set it back to the June level. He regarded the traffic receipts on the L.M.S. railway group as a very good general barometer, even making allowance for some changes in rates and fares. Iho first 34 weeks of 1933 had been onlv 78.6 per cent, of the same period of 1929, but for 1934 it had risen to 82.3 per cent of 1929. The rise of barely 4 per cent reducing the leeway to 18 per cent still to be made good, was some indication of the measure of improvement. That the course was not steadily upward was indicated by the fact that the 35th week was 80.5 per c6nt of 1929 and below the year's average, and only 2i per cent above 1933. Sir Josiah said that almost at the moment in early July when signs of strengthening were taking place in Britain, a new phase of weakness showed itself in America in business activity. Tho Uhited States was. the last country that could be successfully planned on Socialistic lines. If individualism were to be retained as the driving force Qf the machine it was still necessary to focus most on making it easier for the profits to be made by which alone unemployment could be 'finally diminished. Under some of the codes much adjustment would still be required.

BLOOD-PRESSURE Dr. Leonard Williams, in an address the New Health Society's summer school at Malvern, England, said that the fashionable disease of the moment was blood-pressure. Although it was called a disease, it was really a mechanical fact, because without bloodpressure we could have no existence. "The typical high blood-pressure person, "he went on, "is the bald, fat man of 50, who has never had indigestion in his life, and who, if you tell hirn that he should not eat and drink so much, will say that 'those doctors don't know what they're talking about.' But one days he bends down to tie up his bootlace, and has a stroke. There is nothing refined or nice about high blood-pressure, although it is so fashionable. It is due to gross overfeeding and insufficient exercise, and over-indul-gence generally. The opposite type of man is the tall, thin, cadaverous person, with low blood-pressure, whose one desire is to lie down, and who hates doing anything which necessitates his being upright. He is really no more refined than the fat man, because he has probably been eating and drinking things which poison him just as much as the fat man has. The sleeplessness oft the fashionable woman who says that she is a martyr to insomnia is usually due to over-eating, which results in high blood-pressure at night. The pleasure we get when we see a thriller at the cinema or on the stage is really high blood-pressure. A loud, sudden noise sends up your bloodpressure in order that blood may be furnished to the extremities to enable the body to respond to the primitive instincts of fight or flight. The reason that you get pleasure out of music is because your blood-pressure is raised." Dr. Williams advised those who wished to avoid high blood-pressure not to make a fetish of exercise. A three-mile walk every day on the level was quite enough for most people.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION Preaching before the officers and many of the members of the British Association at Aberdeen, Sir George Adam Smith said no truth had been more steadily pressed upon Israel than that all their- life, national and individual, lay in the sight and in the care of. God —not a God far off, but by their side, "a shade on our right hand." Such for nearly 2000 years had been the vision which nature had presented to Christian faith and to other religions, the vision of a personal God, the vision of a mind and character and purpose immanent in the material universe, the origin and basis of all substance and life. The truth of this had, of course, been denied again and again; sometimes by a philosophic pantheism which, while acknowledging a divine immanence in nature, denied to this any sort of personality, and sometimes by a sheer and often crude materialism which, claiming to speak in the name of strict science, refused.to see in matter and its constituent elements any proof or sign of divinity whatsoever. But of late there had been evinced by both biologists and leading authorities in physical science and mathematics a very striking return and, to put it broadly, a convergence upon the Christian position of faith in a personal creator of all living matter and its constituents. Sir George quoted Bacon's saying, "A little philosophy inclineth a man's mmd to atheism, bub depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." And to illustrate his thesis of the return of science toward religious belief, quoted also the words of such scientists as the emiment German biologist Professor Driesch, Professor J. D. Haldane, Professor Sir Arthur Eddington, and Sir James Jeans. It was remarkable, he said, that for the bitterness of the antagonism revived between science and religion since Darwin theologians had been far more to blame than scientists. For theologians, of all people, should not have failed to see that their Scriptures, which in their own belief \ver<; the word of God Himself, presented what was perhaps the most remarkable display of evolution which human history had to show. There was no just reason for supposing that evolution meant the denial of a personal God or need lead to any new opposition between science and religion. On tho contrary, religion was here, as elsewhere, deeply indebted to science. In the proved gradual evolution of our universe there was every proof of a Creator who could wait and who did wait. Physicists and mathematicians had joined in the convergence to which he had referred. Nothing had been more striking than their growing dissatisfaction with merely material conceptions of world and man.