The Thames Star. Resurrexi. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1894. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Thames Star, Volume XXV, Issue 4670, 26 February 1894, Page 2

The Thames Star. Resurrexi. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1894. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The licensing election for the Thames electorate is to to take place on the 21st of March, and now that the exact date is known it is probable thatinterest in the matter will increase. The only names we have so far heard mentioned as probable candidates are Messrs E. McDonnell, T. Eadtord, J. Darrow, H. L. Koefoed, J. West, A, Butler, B. 'B. McGregor, and T. Hammond, but so iar none of those mentioned- have publioly announced themselves. The election promises, Jipwwer, to excite keen iatweßt> aad

it is probable that the temperance people will make a big fight in crder to secure a reduction in the number of licenses, while it is even quite on the cards that an attempt may be made to carry a Prohibition vote. Further developments, however, may be expected in a few days.

Some people have (writes " A.BC." in the B.M. Herald) a singular penchant for giving gloomy forecasts of the future of humanity. It is alleged that man is tending steadily and surely to a toothless and hairless condition, and the climax of pessimism is reached in the assertion that he is losing his little toe. Assuming this statement, which has appeared in an extract from Home, to be true, we have only to brace ourselves up to the inevitable, and calmly make provision for the hairless and toothless state, and nerve ourselves to the contingency of having to go without our little toe. Assuming the truth of the theory of evolution, we should not .repine, but regard the development as showing the perfectibility to which we are heirs. It would be impious to say that we would have been better if we had never had a tooth in our head. But it is an institution that has i been a source of sorrow to us from the cutting of the first one till the last is taken out with the dentist'sjforceps or drops from age, and it has probably been productive in its time of more profane language than all the rest of the organs taken together. Then why should we mourn for coming humanity because of its loss? Nay, on the contrary, we should rather wish that our lot had been deferred to a time in which humanity will only think with a shiver of the sufferings of its forbears, and thank its stars that it has no teeth. For it is of a certainty that, according to the laws of development, if the teeth go, man will develop something ot the nature of the bill of a parrot, or mayhap will be provided with a gizzard to triturate his food. As for a hairless scalp, even in our present unadvanced stage of development, we look on it as a thing commanding resoect, and a man with a bald head | affords pVima facie evidence that he is i a man of matured wisdom. As outward and visible signs have always an | iuward efficacy, and tend to produce j the mental or intellectual excellence of i which they are symbols, it will follow that a hairless people will be uniformly wise, and the world will never have attained a stage of intellectual perfection till everybody's head is as shiny as a bladder of lard. So the pessimists ! may pessimise as much as they like, and instead of mourning over develop- , meat on the evolutionary lines that were fixed at creation, we should rejoice in the advent of the toothless and hairless era. As for the little toe— well, let it go. Anyone can see at a superficial glance, from the way it huddles up against its fellow and shirks everything like the performance of duty, that it is a mean little thing without the smallest trace of independent personality. And hairless, toothless humanity will go onwards still to perfection, even though deprived of the services <if the little toe.