TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8263, 17 October 1906, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

Mr Hacket, the patriotic Aucklauder, who is travelling New Zpbland in the interests of a National Defence League, deserves to be encouraged There are not many men who are disinterested enuugh to stop work and spend themselves iu the effort to awaken the publio to a realisation of the crying necessity for an effective scheme of national defence. FMt is refreshing to find Auckland has produced a patriot of this type. How long a row he has to hoe has probably not yet dawned on Mr Hacket, whose enthusiasm is still young, and whose ardour has not yet been damped by the cold douche of publio apathy and indifference.

So the Fijian fire-walkers are coming to display their powers at the Exhibition. The European of the twentieth century wishes to rub shoulders with primitive man. What a strange co-mingling we shall have there of the skill and inventiveness of tbe highest civilisation with the myth and ritual of heathendom! Nothing Is too remote from our life and our thought to gratify our taste for sensationalism, and contribute to our "Roman holiday." The fire walls, with its suggestion of grammar ye and its barbaric realism is to add to the enjoyments of Hagley Park along with the water chute and the switchbak. Polynesian and Melanesian alike Tare tc give their aid to the national festival; but the Maori pa can assuredly show us nothing so striking and wonderful as this remuant of savage worship from the Fiji Islands.

History has a curious way of repeating itself, saya the Christchuroh Truth. In 1900 Lord Salisbury, nt the "fehaki" election, gathered in an overwhelming majority from all corners of the country, which, on his death, he bequeathed t-) Mr Balfour. Then Mr Chamberlain came forward with his tnri£f and preference proposals, and split the party iu twain. The Balfourain majority gradually dwindled away, und the party, discredited in Parliament and in tbe country, \va9 routed by its opponents in January of this year. In 1905 Mr Seddou swept the country, and gathered iu Liberals aud psuedo Liberals into his following as a boy gathers gooseberries, till he had a record majority. But he never lived to see them trail into tbe lobby at his heels, and the wheel cf fortune turned them over to Sir Joseph Ward. Then Mr McNab (with apologies to Chamberlain) came out with hie leasehold Land Bill, and ou the tenure iseue whittled the Government mojority down by two-thirds. To-

day the Liberals in New Zealand show the same spineless vacillation which waa the undoing of Mi* Balfour, and it will be only natural if the sequel is the same in each case.

- The American Department of Agriculture, which in the thoroughness and completeness of its work sets an example to all other similar departments, is at present engaged iu an investigation which should be of the utmost value to the American farmer. The department already devotes much tiiue and labour to collecting information with regard to the extent of the crops in the United States, and what markets they axe sold in, aad so far as it goes the knowledge thus obtained is of undoubted value. But the heads of the department believe that it would be quite as interesting and infiuitely more useful to the individual farmer if he had more defiinlte information as to what it cost him to produce his crops. This the Department is now endeavouring to ascertaiu. Among the Department officials there ia a tolerably strong conviction that comparatively few farmers have this knowledge. Their attention ia devoted almost exclusively to producing a crop, and as they lack accurate knowedge of the method of keeping of accounts of the elements of cost which enter into production, they have no means of knowing where and how they may reduce the expense.

If Professor BemHeim ia correct in saying that Professor Behring's serum fcr the cure of tuberculosis ia of uo use,we have another illustration of the dangers of premature publication of supposed eoientiflo discoveries. It fair to Professor Behring *o say that he himself was very guarded in his statements, but the history of soience of late years supplies many cases of too precipitate action on the part of supposed discoverers, and it is not surprising to find a dtiong plea being entered for more restraint on the part of scientific workers. Lord Kelvin was recently moved to enter a protest against visionary pronouncements on the subjeot of radium, and Professor Henry Armstrong, in supporting tpe great British scientist, remarks that pure imagination is taking the place of reason and proof in the field of radio-activity. An American weekly recalls the expectations of the workers in X-rays and liquid air. The rays were to solve the inner secrets of life, and liquid air was to become the supplauter of ateam and electricity as a motive power. "The first is now a minor attribute of surgery; the seoond a prop of the vaudeville stage." In medical soience, this journal goes on to point oat, there has been a lamentable lack of restraint. An American magazine of high reputa tion recently published an article by an eminent doctor, announcing the disoovery, in trypsin, of a cure for canoer, and to a lay mind the statements of the author were fairly convincing. Experiments with trypsin have since shown that the "remedy" is more harmful than otherwise.