News and Notes.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 5247, 16 April 1908, Page 4

News and Notes.

The Canadian correspondent of The Times stales that Lord Grey’s scheme for the nationalisation of the Plains of Abraham is making splendid progress. The Dominion Parliament will vote towards its realisation at lopsl .650,000 and the Quebec Legislative £20,000. The Saturday Review says that there is a good deal of rubbish written about the advantages of ships embodying the very latest ideas by delaying their construction, whereas it is well understood in Germany, and our experience with the Swiftsure and Triumph has shown, it is a great deal more important to build them iu batches so that we have similarity of types, or what is known as standardisation. Tn addition, it says: —“Vacillating programmes are the worst form of extravagance.”

King Manuel’s absence from the royal funeral at Lisbon occasioned general disappointment. In commenting on the decision the newspapers characterise it as a great mistake, saying that his Majesty lost a splendid opportunity for a first appearance in public, when ho would have been enthusiastically received. The young King is counselled to trust himself fearlessly to the nation as the best means of obtaining popularity. The Montreal correspondent of The Tl.ms, under date 20th February, writes :—One hundred Lancashire miners have arrived hero from Fernie, British Columbia, e:i route for England. They say that they were brought out last autumn by a promise of steady work, but, owing to the short demand for coal in consequence of the mild winter, they have averaged only two days’ work a week each during the winter months.

The W( st.iiinster Gazette observes that Mr Digger, the inventor of the system of “obstruction” in the House of Commons, which the late Mr Isaac Bud used to call the policy of exasperation, would certainly have been amused if he could have known that he would have been indirectly responsible for Lord Curzon’s peerage. Mr Biggar was the principal factor in the dropping in the House of Commons in 1076 of the Irish Peerage Bill, prohibiting any future creation of Irish peers. If that Bill had become law Lord Curzon could not have been crealed a peer of Ireland. Among a number of famous autographs to be put up t.» auction in Berlin is the original proclamation issued by King William of Prussia to the French people, after the collapse of the second Sedan. The French people had taken the place of the Empire, which had declared war against Prussia, and to them the old King addressed himself. When M. Thiers undertook his circular tour through Europe to plead for intervention, he mot Leopold von Ranke, the historian at Vienna. “ The Empire has now fallen, said Thiers; “ what are you fighting with now !” !‘With Louis XIV.” replied Ranke, “ who robbed us of Alsace-Lorraine.”

The valentine (writes the Westminster Gazette) is not yet wholly dead. It survives fitfully in the more than libellous coloured pictures that are still to be found in some of the shops, and that present a double mystery. Who, one wonders at the same moment, draws those fearful and wonderful caricatures, and who provides the verses that go below them ? Here indeed is the wonder of wonders; for the valentine verso is more fearfully made than the music-hall song. A poet laureate has boon known to write for the music-halls ; but the valentino verso is beyond the power of any j- et laureate. It stands alone in its disregard of all the rules that shackle feebler minds.

The possibility of renewed fighting between our troops and the warlike Afridis (says St, James' Budget) brings to mind an incident of an earlier campaign. An officer of the British force pointed out to one of the friendly Afridis bearing arms with his men a black fellow skulking round the fort obviously with ovil intent. “ I see him, sar,” replied the Afridi sentry, pointing with his finger at the Afridi enemy. “ I Bee him sar; had two shots at him already. Him very hard to hit; him do hardest man to hit I know.”

“ Ah, then, you know him do you ?” said the officer. “ Yes, sar, I know him—great rascal—been trying to shoot him all de week.” “ Well, who is he ?—what’s his name ?” “Oh, beiy great rascal, sar—he my father!”

The I has set itself to dispel the notion that there is any real analogy between the rat as a diffuser of plague and the mosquito as a transmitter of intermittent fever. The mistake is quite natural; but, says the Times, “the rnr logy is so superficial as to be seri- usJy erroneous. Intermittent fever is caused by a parasite which lives and multiplies, as far as souio of its phases are concerned, in huuia. l blood. When this parasite is swallowed by a mosquito it undergoes certaiu changes in the body of the insect, and is introduced by its bite into a healthy subject in a condition or phase of existence different from that which it was in when the mosquito swallowed it. The changes which it undergoes in the mosquito appear to be essential to its infecting a healthy human being through the medium of a mosquito bite. In the case of the rat, on the other hand, the flea is a mere accident, a mere carrier of rat’s blood containing the plague bacillus. If a plague-infected rat were pricked with a needle, and a healthy man were pricked with the same needle directly aftewards, the man would be liable to develop plague as a result of the simple puncture; while there seems to be no possible way of contracting intermittent fever, except through the bito of a mosquito.”