NEWS ITEMS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume L, Issue 12242, 16 June 1909, Page 3

NEWS ITEMS.

According to the estimates of the municipal authorities, the present population of New York City is 4,500,000, an increase of half a million in the past four years (reports the New York correspondent of the '"Daily Express"). The city contains 1,800,000 Germans and children of Germans, almost as many as there are in Berlin; 1,200,000 Irish, or more Irish than there are in Dublin; 750,000 Jews, more than there are in any other city in the worlds and 450,000 Italians, ranking New York - t next to Naples, Milan, and Rome as an Italian metropolis. The rest of the population is divided among representatives of almost every nationaity in the word. There are also some Americans.

There is a burglar abroad in London who:.has exchanged the proceeds of his crimes all unwittingly for two pounds of good household soap (says the " Daily Express"). ,It came^ about thus. A careful housewife mounted an Edgware Road omnibus at Paddingtori, carrying a neat brown-paper, parcel which contained the two pounds of soap. A welldresed burglar mounted the same om: nibus carrying a neat brown-paper parcel which contained gold watches and jewellery.worth about £400. When the woman reached home she was surprised to find in her parcel jewels instead of soap. She took it to Scotland Yard, where it was received with delight by the police, who believe the jewels to bo the proceeds of a burglary at Maida Vale. What the burglar did when he discovered the contents of his parcel is not yet known, but the police hope before long to find out.

, After a reign of some 2200 years, Euclid is deposed from its throne in the •secondry school .(says a London paper). Such is the result of the Board of Education White Paper on the " Teaching of Geometry and Graphic Algebra." The general effect of the recent changes in the treatment of geometry, it states, has been beneficial. The following are some points from the White Paper:— " 'Straight' needs no explanation, and" all attempts at' definition are waste of time. Progress in geometry does not depend,, on the memorising of definitions. Axioms are sti 1 less necessary, and the best course is probably never to mention them. Euclid did not write for children but for men. To commence the subject by proving what seems^to them to need no proof is a safe way to make boys think that the whole subject is artificial and unreal." The new mathematics, in fact, are no longer to be infinitely wearisome and dry-as-dust to the schoolboy, who is to be freed from-much "dull and pointless" toil.