NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22240, 15 October 1935, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

A BIRTH-RATE FALLACY

An attack on medical officers of health for creatine false hopes of an improved national standard of health in Britain, based on the lowered infant mortality rate, was mado by Captain Pitt-Rivers, tho well-known eugenist, speaking at tho world congress on population problems in Berlin. "Lowered infant mortality only results in a constitutional impoverishment of the quality of . our breeding mothers," Captain Pitt-Rivers said. "Wo have succeeded in lowering the infant mortality rate, but only at the price of a high maternal rate. Wo save the weak and defective mothers at birth and during childhood, and they become increasingly unfitted themselves to survive giving birth. This is reflected in a high mortality rate in the next generation, 16 to 30 years later. Tho point is that medical services and obstetrical advances cannot and do not help. It is unreasonable to hail tho reduction in tho rate of infant mortality as evidenco of a higher standard of national health and fitness. Indeed, tho reverse is much nearer the truth."

BRITISH TRADES UNIONS The Trades Union Congress this year reported its first increase in membership since 19110 and another year of freedom from large-scale industrial disputes, says the Manchester Guardian. Its membership is still barely half what it was in the peak year of British unionism, 1920, but it has probably touched bottom. Even so, the congress cannot survey the statistics of the movement without misgiving. Tho war figures were, of course, abnormal, but it might have been expected that tho level reached in tho good years of 1924-5 might at least have been held in the groups in which there has been in the last decade no catastrophic reduction in personnel. Yet a comparison of the returns before tho general strike with' those of last year shows that in only one group, that dominated by distribution, has there been an increase on the ton years. The number of employed workers has grown by more than a million in the decade; tho number of trade unionists has decreased by a million. The explanation is in tho main that the trade union movement is fairly rigid; it has not kept pace with new developments in industry—capitalist organisation has been more fluid than that of labour; it has not followed industry into new places and implanted a trade union tradition where hitherto it was non-existent. The trade union leaders may well feel some disquiet that a generation is growing up in whom the spirit of organisation for industrial purposes is weak.

GEOLOGY CONFIRMS EVOLUTION "Form, drift and rhythm of the continents" was the subject of Professor W. W. Watts in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His opening remarks dealt with the contribution of geology in support of the theory of evolution. "Although definitely richer than when Darwin wrote, the geological record," Professor Watts said, "still is, and must from its very nature remain, imperfect. Every major group of animal life but the vertebrates is represented in the Cambrian fauna, and the scant relics that have been recovered from earlier rocks give very little idea of what had gone before, and Ho evidence whatever as to the beginnings of life. But, from Cambrian time onward, the chain of life is continuous and unbroken. Type after typo has arisen, flourished, and attained dominion. Some of them havo met extinction in the heyday of their development; others havo slowly dwindled away; others, again, have not finished their downhill journey, or are still advancing to thoir climax. Study of the succession of rocks and the organisms contained in them, in every case in which evidence is sufficiently abundant and particularly among the vertebrates and in the later stages of geological history, has now revealed that the great majority of species show close affinities with those which preceded and with those which followed them; that, indeed, they have been derived from their predecessors and gave origin to their successors. We may now fairly claim that palaeontology has lifted the theory of evolution of organisms from the limbo of hypothesis into a fact completely demonstrated by the integral chain of life which links the animals and plants of to-day with the earliest of their forerunners of the most remote past."

NEW THEATRE DESIGN In tho last dozen years or so a ferment of ideas has been at work among the younger generation of theatre dosigners and producers, says tho Manchester Guardian. Stago societies and repertory associations have carried out many fruitful experiments, and oven the commercial theatre has not been entirely unaffected. Whatever tho "functional" or other language expressing the new ideas, it is clear that the theatre is moving toward a design of building very different from tho old "picture-frame" convention of the past. In the current issue of the London Mercury Mr. Herbert Read describes an extraordinary new design for a "modern theatre" by tho Dutch architect Gropius. The interior of this theatre would bo shaped liko an enormous egg. Tho auditorium is built up in circles like an amphitheatre, and there are three movable stages, which might be placed at one side (so permitting either the conventional prosconium or an apron stage) or in the centre, in which case the audience would sit round tho stago, as in a circus. The chango from ono form of stago to tho other could be made mechanically even during an actual performance, a "section of tho audienco being carried round with tho machinery." It is argued that in such a theatre thoro would bo'nono of the divorce, obligatory in present theatro buildings, between tho action on tho stage and tho auditorium. Every seat would have a good view, and thero would be facilities for continuous showing, with no need for the action of the play to bo held up for changes of sceno. So,*it is urged, the theatre might return to compete on better terms with tho cinema. Dramatists should also be glad, since at last they would have a theatre suited to tho needs of a new ago, a "theatro worth writing for."