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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLI, Issue 20326, 27 January 1936, Page 2

American courts are conducted on incredibly undignified and informal lines. In fact, they afford an amazing contrast with the decorum of British court procedure. This was the impression gained by Mr Charles S. Thomas, a well-known Christchurch awyer, who attended as a spectator a murder trial at Santa Barbara during a recent visit to California. “Americans never fail to advertise the best and largest,” he said, "but they fail to tell you the worst—their system of criminal justice. I was astounded at the absolute lack of dignity and the informality in their courts.” At the Santa Barbara trial, he continued, the judge was a chatty person, who, at one stage, when a surveyor was having difficulty in pinning up a plan, stepped from the Bench and offered assistance. Illustrative of the lengths to which this free-and-easy justice went, Mr Thomas said that during a “recess” everybody in the court walked about, talking, an the man who, to all apearanc.es' was about to be hanged, stepped from the dock ''nd chatted amiably with several young women who were interested spectators. Mr Thomas described the trial as an entertainment, and said that New Zealanders could rest assured that the court scenes which they saw in American films were no exaggeration.

Professor Albert Gilligan, of Leeds University, declared that without dust there could be no life, because there would be no rain. He added:—“Water condenses only when it can find a nucleus of some kind. Every raindrop that falls from the sky has as its centre a speck of dust. The specks are microscopic, out they are always there. When the coal supplies of the world are exhausted—as they will be within 2000 years—man will use smokeless fuel. That will mean the end of fogs, for fogs are only possible where there are sufficient particles of impurity in the air to form them.”