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Timaru Herald, Volume CI, Issue 15399, 16 July 1914, Page 6

A great scheme, estimated to cost three million pounds, to prevent the periodic flooding of •30,000 acres of privately owned knds in the Thames Yallev has been prepared by an English engineer, and will be considered by local authorities. It proposes that the river should be -widened and deepened from Oxford towards its source. Most of the islands in the Thames would have to be removed, and bridges and towpaths would require to te reconstructed along- ninety-five miles of the river's course. According to the London "Daily News,' 5 '" the scheme would seem to involve the destruction of many beautiful features of the valley of the Thames, and most people—leaving out the landowners—would probably prater the floods." " >

The information cabled vesterday that a French scientist, M. Georges Bignaux, has exhibited an invention called the telephone, which transmits pictures in light and shade along wires, will be inadequate until we learn how far he can transmit them and at what cost. Experiments in telegraphing vision were first commenced about four years ago by Professor Ernst Euhnier, of Berlin, and 31. Edouard Uelin, of Paris, whose apparatus" made use of selenium cells. Their ideas were developed further by other scientists, but the great difficulty so far lias been the reproduction on the viewing scene of the successive units of an image in a sufficiently short time for the eye to see these units '"en masse.'*' Euhnier estimated that 10,000 selenium cells would be required for an apparatus able to transmit by telegraph the complete image of a human person, and that the cost would be about £'500,000. Apart from cost he saw "no insurmountable reason why the Admiralty in Berlin might not be able to watch the German Armada in the jSTorth Sea.'' An English inventor, Dr Low, has been working on the problem recently, but- his method requires the use of so many telegraph wires to connect two pieces of apparatus as to render tele-vision over any great distance practically out of the question. When distance has been annihilated for sound: speech, sight, and travel, the people who like privacy will j have a great grievance against I science.

The idea of China sendingmissionaries to America and Europe must appear strange to people who imagine in a vague way that the western world learned all it could learn from the East two thousand years ago and earlier, and has every claim now to be the Orient's xeaenei-. That is not the opinion, however, of a distinguished Chinese statesman, Wn Ting Yang, who was Chinese Minister to the United States for many years. White people, he declares, do not understand comfort because they have no leisure to enjoy contentment. They measure life by accumulatiou, and the people of the East by morality. Religion has -apparently little influence on Western civilisation, whereas it is the corner-stone of society in all Asiatic civilisations. "From personal observation, 7 ' says "Wu, "' I have formed the opinion that the Chinese are more contented than the Americans, and on the whole happier." The chief ditference between the two points •of view, he suggests, is that the Chinese do not expend so much energy in trying to make other people good, but more in trying id bo good themselves. Wu seems to be a shrewd observer.