PERSONAL.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16327, 17 January 1921, Page 7

PERSONAL.

Mr D. G. Sullivan, M.P., returned to Christchurch on Saturday. Mr Justice Stringer arrived from the north by yesterday’s ferry steamer. Lieutenant-Colonel F. Symons, of the New Permanent .Staff, has been appointed officer-in-charge of the training camp at Burnham. Councillor E. O. Leake, of Johannesburg, who is on a visit to Canterbury, made an official call on the Mayor (Dr Thacker, M.P.) to-day. The Hon G. M. Thomson has received advice that the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press have undertaken, on satisfactory terms, the publication of his work, “ The Histor of the Naturalisation of Animals and Plants in New Zealand.” It is understood that Messrs A. D. M'Leod, M.P. (Wairarapa) and W. Dow hie Stewart, M.P. (Dunedin) will represent the House of Representatives on the Commission that is about to bo set up to report on the hospital system of the Dominion, savs the “ Wairarapa News.” Mr John Stewart, whose death is reported from Tauranga at the age of eighty-eight years, was a veteran of the Maori war. He took part in the fighting at Taranaki and also in the Waikato. In 1866 he married in Auckland and shortly afterwards went to Tauranga, where lie had resided ever since. Deceased is survived by, one son. and two daughters. Professor A. W. Bicker ton, president of the London Astronomical Society, was in November delivering a series of lectures liefore an audience of Fellows of the Royal Botanic Society. Referring to the fact that lie had received his first lessons in science from a blacksmith named Moses Pullen, Professor Bickerton said there was a need for clever artisans to learn the sciences and pass the most wonderful knowledge on to their fell’ow artisans. “One can understand a man such as Moses Pullen being interested in science,” he declared. “ for, in mending a pump or anything, the thoughtful worker is in contact with Nature.” Of Moses Pullen he has since said he was “ one of the finest science masters under whom T ever studied, the village blacksmith turned schoolmaster, and it was he who taught me the value of practical teaching as compared with the merely academic. His own rough-aiwl-readV methods got right down to the very bones and marrow of liis basic principles. However abstruse the problem in hand, he had no difficulty in presenting it so clearly that almost any dunderhead could understand the subject and keep a grip on it. When 1 became a science master myself, one of the first things I did was to get as my assistants the postmaster and an apprentice' from Moses Pullen's village of Painswick, in Gloucestershire. They helped me tremendously, and out of these classes, taught by clever artisans, arose the technical instruction classes for the whole of London.”