HERE AND THERE

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17567, 18 June 1925, Page 8

HERE AND THERE

AN EYE FOR EVERYTHING. END OF ELLIS ‘ ISLAND? Department of Labour officials in Washington are engaged in a series of conferences which aim at the elimination of Ellis Island as the headquarimmigrauts aro landed for examination ]t is planned, to establish stations abroad and thus save unsuitable immigrants a futile voyage. IB lis Island is the depot at which immigrantsare landed for examination at New York. Its methods and administration have been strongly criticised, notably by Sir Auckland Geddes, who visited it while British Ambassador in Washington. THE END/OF THE WORLD. “What is the end of the world?” asks Mr James Douglas in the “Sunday Express.” “The conventional view is that at a certain hour on a certain day the earth will cease to exist as a toy balloon ceases to exist when it is pricked by a pin or a glowing cigarette end touches it. and it blows up. Thereafter there will be no more mankind. All our inventions and all our literature, all our sciences and all our arts will vanish in nothingness. There will be no more life and no more love. I do not believe that is what is meant by the end of the world. I believe that for you and for me and' for everybody the old world comes to an end every night as we fall asleep, and the new world begins every morning as we wake. This is the most cheerful fact in life.” LUCK FOR CRICKETERS. Tens of thousands of cricket club members in Great Britain are affected by an official intimation that they are no longer liable for entertainment tax on their season tickets. Tha tax has been at the rate of -i on the first 15s, and Cd on every additional os of the amount of the club subscription. As the average county 'cricket club ticket costs £2 2s a year, the duty payable was os. It was upheld by a Higlit Court judgment in 1922, when the Essex County Cricket Club refused to pay, and were sued by the Attorney-General. The remission is a consequence of the 1921 Budget concession withdrawing entertainment duty on admission prices not exceeding sixpence. The Customs Commissioners in arriving at their decisions. divide the amount of the annual subscription, by the number of matches for which the member's season ticket is available. A FAMOUS PIANO COMPOSITION. •Bach’s 4S preludes and fugues, familiarly known as “ the 48,” are universally regarded by musicians as an unsurpassed series of compositions for the piano. The average young piano student, however, stili is somewhat hazy as to the origins and the significance of this great music. The full title given to it by Bach was “Fortyeight Preludes and Fugues for the Well-Tempered Clavichord ” —“ well tempered ” referring to the then entirely new method of tuning that instrument, which was the forerunner cf the modern pianoforte. What is of more importance to the student is the music itself, a chain of pieces running through all the major and minor keys —two preludes and two fugues in each of the twelve keys of the chromatic scale. AH of them are wonderful ns examples cf Bach's technical skill in composition. Most of them are of great musical beauty. This is music of the inexhaustible sort, which never grows tiresome by repetition of it. but is the more beloved the better it is known. Moreover, “ the 4S ” provide unequalled matter for training the fingers in part-playing. *** TESTING THEIR HONESTY. Intelligence tests have often been tried in schools, but a “ test for honesty ” carried out by a certain newspaper seems to have been more costly than educational. A hundred-dollar bill was sent to ten clergymen, ten lawyers, ten journalists, ten scientists, and so on. with the untruthful explanation that it was “ in adjustment of the error complained of in our account.” The different professions were then placed in order of merit, on the score cf “ honesty.*' according to the percentage of the recipients in each class who returned the bill. Twenty-five per cent of the people who received the bill returned it, and the clergy came top with a percentage of 66. Not a single man cf science returned it. and that group therefore figures at the bottom of the list. It is arguable that the 75 per cent who did not return the bill imagined that referred to a transaction which they had forgotten, and gave the windfall the benefit of the doubt. The fact that the clergv came out best in this “ honesty test ” perhaps only shows that they have more time to attend to small matters, and the opposite fact that men of science are too busy to bother about their private accounts. Few people will regard the results seriously and refuse to trust a scientific man in future. FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE. When we consider the marvellous complexity of our bodily organisation it seems a miracle that we should live at all; much more that the innumerable organs and processes should continue day after day and year after little friction that we arc sometimes scarcely conscious of having a body at all. And yet in that body we have more than two hundred bones of complex and varied forms, any irregularity in or injury to which would, of course, grievously interfere with our movements. We have over five hundred muscles, each nourished by almost innumerable blood vessels, and reguthc heart—beats over thirty million times in a year, and if it once stops ail is over. In the skin arc wonderfully varied and complete organs—for instance, over two million perspiration glands, which regulate the temperature and communicate with the surface by ducts, which have a total length of some ten miles. Think of the miles of arteries and veins, of capillaries and nerves: of the blood, with the millions of millions of blood corpuscles, each a microcosm in itself. Think of the organs of sense—the eye. with its cornea bumOtir. and choroid, culminating in the retina, no thicker than a sh**t of paper, and yet consisting of nine distinct layer 5. the innermost composed of rods and cone? supposed to the immediate recipients of the undulations of light, and so numerous tha* in each eye the cones are estimated at over three million, the rods at over thirty million. Above all. and most wonderful of all, the brain itself. Meinert has calculated that the grey matter alone contains no les3 than six hundred million cells; each cell consists of several thousand visible molecules, and each molecule again of many millions of atoms.