MERE, THERE & EVERYWHERE.

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17984, 1 April 1930, Page 6

MERE, THERE & EVERYWHERE.

(3y “Gleaner.”} LOW FLYING. Aa least one airman has met his deserts for flying too flow over a town. The certificate of a civil air pilot. in Australia has been suspended for flying at a low altitude over a Sydney suhurh. where he ultimately crashed. The informing cable adds that the practice is expressly forbidden by the regulations. It is time the New Zealand authorities made a lesson of some of our own street-corner boys of the air, aerial counterparts of the open silencer, beret crowned motor-cycle moron. • * • • INDIAN DOCTORS. The news that the British Medical Council has decided that it cannot any longer accept medical graduates of Indian universities as qualified to practice as doctors in Britain is not altogether unexpected. The question has been under discussion for some time past in its various aspects. Of one side of the question Sir Cecil Walsh, at one time a puisne judge in India, speaking of the Indian Medical Service. says:— "It is from this distinguished Service that English civil surgeons are appointed, and it is impossible to speak too highly of their past record and present reputation. Many Indians of position and wealth consult them rather than their countrymen. They bear military titles, but their work is among civilians. They are responsible for the European hospitals (except the railway ones), and l'or the health, and sometimes the management, of the gaols, and they perform nearly all important operations. . . . English women will not, as a rule, submit to be attended, or operated on, by an Indian gentleman, however highly qualified. . . . Indian medical men are, according to my judicial experience, strangely indifferent to the importance of forensic medicine. There is, I believe, no official training in it. I heard it often said in Court that at post morterns some of them will not go inside the dissecting room, but look through the window and examine the parts when shown lo them by the menial who does the dissecting under their direction. Appellate Judges in the High Courts have had to complain of the inadequacy of the reports—when Indian gentlemen have done the-work.

It is not to be denied that there are Indian doctors of high attainments. But there is a tendency to judge the bulk by selecting the best specimens as fair samples of the whole. In a service like the 1.M.5., whose branches spread everywhere, it is the bulk which matters. The value of the English doctor in India —and look what lie lias done in tackling tropical diseases —lies not so much in his academic achievements as in the grounding and practical insight which he has received from his hospital training in England, and in his practical capacity, his sense of discipline—an inestimable asset in India —and his power of setting an example of work. * * V * WHY WE READ. As far back as Aristotle the joys of contemplating reality have been thoroughly appreciated, but it is only in our own days that the development of statistics and the skilful use of the questionnaire have enabled us to get a thorough grasp of .reality and take.a really good look. Some hundred and fifty investigators in the United States have recently applied themselves to an intensive study of that marked characteristic of the modern universe, the extent to which human beings read. Why do they do it? Here the questionnaire can help, and has been made to help. Research by means of the questionnaire is highly skilled work, for answers, particularly when they do not have to be signed, are often untruthful. The investigators report sadly that often the answers were plain boasting, and that there are still plenty of people who do not hesitate to credit themselves with the highest possible motives when they are asked the reason for anything they do. There are also people who think a questionnaire a good place for facetiousness, though such ribaldry is practically the same as laughing in church, for members of the same community should have no secrets from one another. But in spite of these obstacles the social sciences go forward, for investigators who know the human heart know in advance what sort of answers will have to be cancelled as flippant or dishonest.

It may be different in this country; time and science will show. But it must he admitted that the results in America are an admirable corrective to the vanity of literary men. In one selected group of 410 readers, which is taken for discussion in a recent number of The Librarian, 20 said that they were reading by chance, 16 to get a laugh, and 18 in order to get sleepy. The young read more books than the old, but the married read more than the unmarried, and are older. Those under 20 read most books, but this includes all the compulsory reading of the very young. Not one person in two ever reads any hook at all. Readers, the investigators conclude, must he caught young, and 15 is mentioned as the "age at which the habit is formee or missed. * Reading, according to a famous epigram, is the opium of the West; but it is not a soporilic, for the figures show that the active readers arc also the active- figures in social life,, the theatre-goers, the lecture audience, and even the dancers and, card players of their towns, it is true that they are found to sew less, and to do fewer jobs about the house; hut even so their full lives clearly demand some violence to nature, and, in fact, the questionnaire has wrested their last secret from them, and they have admitted that they stay up later at night than non-readers do. Reading, which should be the antechamber to sleep, is too often its substitute. Newspapers, say the investigators, are read increasingly as the decades pass, and come more and more to replace books as the reading of the elderly.