NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22543, 7 October 1936, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

CAMPAIGN AGAINST LITTER A group of women's institutes were holding a.n original meeting on an English common known aB No Man's Land, writes Sir W. Beach Thomas in the Spectator. It opened with a cricket match (in which incidentally it was held improper to run byes). It ended with a less facetious and a wholly admirable competition for special prizes. They were given to the institutes whose teams collected the greatest amount of litter in five minutes. As tho meeting was held three days after Bank Holiday and the common is not at a great distance from London, the circle of the cricket ground was smothered with rubbish, including many broken bottles. The common was a different place after this characteristically feminine campaign. The prize-winners were twice blessed. WAR AND PROGRESS War has been the instrument of progress in the past and may be so again, writes Sir Arnold Wilson in the Spectator. Every existing State in both the Americas was the outcome of a war of aggression led by various kinds of pilgrim fathers. Every one of our Dominions was born by acts of aggression against the inhabitants. Wc may regret the fact, but to ignore it is to lay ourselves open to charges of cant and hypocrisy—besetting sins of the English-speaking races. Decisions between nations as to right and wrong are essentially political, not judicial, and cannot be Reached by assemblies of delegates selected at hazard. Life is precious; few men will offer it except in the service of a cause in which they really believe —a moral issue must In? involved as well as a direct national interest. Speeches in Paris proclaiming our readiness to come to the defence of France will not bring a single man to tho colours. "That horse will not run," as every recruiter knows. The average citizen would prefer an alliance with Germany.

AN APPEAL TO COURTESY I foci that a word in favour of courtesy may not be ill-timed in the war-distraught world of to-day, writes Father Vincent McNabb in the Listener. The common and correct opinion that an appeal to courtesy is an appeal to the romantic in mankind should not at once rule courtesy out of the peace counsels of men. ]f appeals for peace in the lesser names of trade and finance have failed, courtesy may now prove to be not only of personal, but even of international importance. To illustrate —one winter's morning in Newcastle-on-Tyne a group of boys and girls were standing waiting outside their school for the doors to open. Not a few of the children were barefooted. One of the barefooted girls was stamping her little feet and crying with the cold. Beside her stood a barefooted boy —perhaps her brother. When lie saw her crying he took his poor cloth cap from his head and put it under her feet. His only sought reward was a smile of thanks and two grateful eyes glistening with drying tears. But he was a true Raleigh of true courtesy. While the modern world can still give us this courtesy, no outbursts of uncontrolled youth and no orgies of bloodshedding can quench our hope. MYSTERIES OF THE ATOM The structure of the restless atom can no longer be explained in simple terms, writes Mr. E. S. Grew, in the London Observer. For the mathematicians and physicists who examine it in a thousand laboratories girdling the world the atom has been transformed from a speck of matter into a mathematical framework, always having to be altered so that new facts may bo fitted in. The models of it they sometimes offer for consideration are mere concessions to the human weakness for seeing things in a picture. They soon lose their simplicity. The Rutherford atom, of a central nucleus, with electrons revolving ahout it as planets round a sun, is the most abiding picture, and is a tribute to the genius of its architect. But the links between the nucleus of matter and the satellites of electricity ask much more of the mathematician, because there are so many things left to explain. Why they stick together we cannot tell. These ideas are in the end mathematical suppositions, and it may well be that the physical facts of the universe do not respond to human logic. But the more the atom is probed the farther recedes the expectation that science will be able to tap its concentrated energv for any practical purpose, so as to obtain power for nothing. RAW AND PASTEURISED MILK The much-debated question as to whether pasteurisation lowers the food value of milk is discussed in an official pamphlet issued by the British Advisory Committee on Nutrition, which says:— The eflects of heat on the nutritive value of milk for animals have been extensively studied, but the few human experiments that have been done have not shown that heat significantly lowers the food value of milk for man. This does not necessarily mean that heated milk is equal in all respects to raw milk, since such a conclusion could only be drawn if we knew all there is to be known about human nutrition and about the nutritive properties of milk, and this is far from being the case. So far as is known, the only significant changes effected in the composition of milk by heat are a partial loss of vitamin C and possibly of iodine. The amount of vitamin C in raw milk is, in any case, small, and even in raw milk some loss usually occurs in course of distribution. These deficiencies can be made good in the diet of babies led exclusively 011 cows' milk by the addition of fruit or vegetable juice and codliver oil, and in the diets of children and adults by the other items in a good mixed diet which should always contain potatoes or other vegetables or fresh fruit and some sea fish. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that heated or dried milk or milk incorporated in other cooked articles of diet such as bread and puddings retains most of the nutritional properties of raw milk. The heating of milk, moreover, has important advantages in rendering it safe for consumption. The ideal is milk from perfectly healthy cows, but herds in which all the cows are perfectly healthy arc at present relatively few. Where such milk is not available, the report concludes, the milk should be pasteurised or boiled before um.