CURRENT TOPICS

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7865, 29 July 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS

THE TRAM REGULATIONS. . Tho conference of electric tramway experts with the engineers of the Public Works Department over the proposed regulations under the Tramways Act iva« followed this week by a similar consultation with cable tram representatives. Tho Minister of Public Works (Hon. R. McKenzie) anticipates that his officers will be able to fully report to him within a fortnight, and tho regulations will shortly afterwards be gazetted. THE BARMAIDS* REGISTER. Tho eight hundred and five names which appear on tho Barmaids* Register as gazetted this week do not represent the total number of barmaids who will be registered in the Dominion, as many of the certificates issued by the Labour Department have not yet been returned signed by the various agents. A supplementary? list will bo issued shortly, when the whole of the registration is though, of course, no more applications are being taken. It is expected that when the register is complete it will contain just over one thousand names. TREATMENT OP CANCER. What, to laymen, will seem an extraordinary development of the treatment of disease by anti-toxins is now being tried in Melbourne. The patient, Mr W. H. Judkins, a well-known social re* former, is suffering from malignant cancer, for which no surgical treatment is possible, and his doctors therefore decided to adopt a course which the "Argus” asserts has never been tried in this part of the world before. It was discovered not long ago by Continental doctors that if anybody suffering from cancer was also attacked by erysipelas, the cancer, as one doctor said, ‘‘melted away like snow before tho morning sun.” The condition caused by accidental infection with erysipelas is now being produced by the injection of an anti-toxin prepared from cultures of the erysipelas germ and another germ. Although tho method is admittedly only in an experimental stage, a London practitioner has asserted that he knows personally of fifty-two cases of its successful uuso, and by report of a hundred others. -TRis is the treatment which Mr Judkins's doctors have adopted, and its trial will (oommnets the Christchurch “Press''). no doubt, be watched with keen anxiety by many other sufferers. SHAKESPEARE'S HEROINES. Our London correspondent writes Under tho auspices of the Pioneer Players, Miss Ellen Terry gave the second of her remarkable lectures on Shakespeare's heroines. Many of her points concerning those heroines she designated '‘triumphant" may interest lovers of Shakespeare in New Zealand. The three heroines that she classed particularly together were Beatrice, Rosalind, and Portia. All, she said, were radiant, chivalrous. intelligent, independent,, and all healthy and of fine physique. if they Etui met with, say, a disappointment in love, they would not, as did; Viola, have "sat, like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief.” They would, have turned their abilities into some other channel —one probably where they could best benefit their less masterful sisters., Once again Miss Terry found in tho splendour of their womanhood, a championship of the present suffrage movement. It, was not merely imagination on Shakespeare's part, she said. These, women really existed in Shakespeare's time. Some modern folk seemed to think that the early Victorian woman—the “domestic ornament of the'thirties and'forties'' represented a permanent English ideal, which could not bo improved upon without a revolution. This was not so. There was always the to Shakespeare." In his day, as now, there was a great movement for tho advance of women. Did not Lady Jane Grey read Plato in the original at thirteen, and Mary, Queen of Scots, make an oration in Latin, and Queen Elizabeth translate from the classics, while even the average well-bred English girl of those times was familiar with Xenophon and Seneca. Hence, to some extent at any rate, tho fine intelligence, tho fearless spirit, of these Shakespearean heroines. ;