NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22197, 26 August 1935, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

EDUCATION THE MEANS "Education is a means to an end and not an end in itself," said Earl Winterton, M.P., in an address on the occasion of Founders' Day at Collyer's School, Horsham. "That end ts fitness —physically, mentally and morally—for life and all that it entails. Education should not end with the close of school life, but continue to tho grave, and the people most io bu pitied are those with such arthritic brains that they forget in a few years everything they learned at school, and learn nothing after they leave school." EX-SOLDIERS SEEK PEACE An eloquent plea for international understanding was made by Baron von the leader of the Reich Association of Former War Prisoners, during the visit of tho British Legion delegation to Berlin last month. In laying a wreath of oak leaves on tho Stone of Remembrance in the British War Prisoners' Cemetery, tho baron said: —To-day people stand beside people, before the graves of the soldiers of tho World War. Common is their mourning for tho dead, common their respect for the dead, common the sacred will to love the native country above all. At these graves begins the common determination to bring about a new and better understand: ing between our two jiations and with all the world. Even as the Front Soldiers understand one another, so should there be understanding between people and people. The struggle for mastery and possession must cease; the right of individual being and individual character must bo established. The tokens of this right are not cannon and shells, but a true conscience and a straight mind. The sacrifice of the war dead will not have been in vain. In witness of this do ye, comrades, boys and girls, lay rosebuds on the graves of our dead British comrades. This, the wreath 1 lay, is dedicated to all the British fallen by the German Front Soldiers. IMMUNITY FROM INFLUENZA Experiments which have been made during the last 12 years with mice to ascertain their susceptibility to disease were described by Professor W. W. C. Topley, of the British Medical School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, at the Royal Sanitary Institute Health Congress at Bournemouth last month. Dealing with the significance of these experiments in the practical problems of hygiene, Professor Topley said that until they knew the truth of the matter it would be unwise to embark on a campaign of wholesale immunisation. "We can only learn the truth by field trials properly planned and properly carried out. Surely it should be one of the major preoccupations of an efficient public-health service to plan trials of this kind, to watch for helpful prophylactic methods as they emerge from the laboratory, to submit them at the earliest possible moment to an adequate and critical test, to reject them if they prove ineffective, and adopt them if they fulfil the necessary requirements." Professor Topley revealed that they had two strains of influenza virus being propagated in ferrets and mice, and said that it could not be long before they would be in a position to immunise effectively against the disease. When that was achieved it would be one of the major victories of preventive medicine. A VETERAN'S TESTAMENT "We, the men of yesterday, bear no aureole of romance. We won the war, but we lost the peace," writes Mr. Charles Douie in his new book "Beyond the Sunset." " Returning from the war, we had an unparalleled opportunity to create a better world, and we let it slip. We espoused no causes, we interested ourselves in no new ideas. So runs the criticism; is it true? True, I think it is, as far as it goes. But it is not the whole truth. We might, no doubt, have done more in those early days when we returned from the war. But we were very tired and very preoccupied with the need for getting and keeping our new civilian employment. And we were somewhat distrustful of ideas. We have suffered much under their tyranny. Those who expounded ideas seemed alway3 to be a very long way from the front-line, and the ideas suffered in reputation on that account. Truth to tell, moreover, many of us had not had the intelligence to grasp these ideas. We had fought partly because our manhood had been challenged, and partly because we would not go back on our friends. We had, however, a passionate faith in each other, and this faith has, 1 think, meant much to England, and not the less because it has been inarticulate, unadvertised, and but dimly understood RENAISSANCE STILL GOES ON

"The greatest set-backs that humanity has ever suffered have been due to ruptures of continuity," asserted Dr. Inge, late Dean of St. Paul's, London, in a recent sermon. "A generation arises which can see nothing to respect or, admire in what it has inherited from the past. And so it either destroys the outward symbols and monuments of the earlier culture, or allows them to perish. This happened on a very large scale when the RomanHellenistic culture of classical times was overthrown. It is useless to argue that the Dark Ages, which we may roughly limit as the period between 500 and 1050 or 1100, were not so very dark. They were very dark, indeed, in Western and Central Europe. Humanity would not be much the poorer if thoso 500 or 600 years had been blotted out. Slowly and painfully the broken threads were put together—some of them —at the Renaissance. The fragments of the old civilisation were reverently collected—the great literature, with terrible gaps never to be filled up; scraps of the architecture; trade-copies of great statues, how inferior to the originals those can judge who have seen tho Hermes at Olympia and the lovely bronzes fished up from the bottom of the sea in the present century, now in the museum at Athens. But the spirit of Greece was reborn —first fn poetry and art, then in philosophy, now in natural science. For the Renaissance is not over; it is still going on, and it has brought new life, not only into civilisation, but into Christianity."