UNDERCURRENTS.

Waikato Times, Volume 111, Issue 18642, 21 May 1932, Page 4

UNDERCURRENTS.

HERE, THERE & EVERYWHERE#

(By “ Gleaner.”}

A CHANCE FOR ALL',

The funds of the Nobel Foundation now amount to some two and a quarter million pounds sterling, and it is announced that there will be five awards this year.

Alas! thev will be made, on the same old silly system of merit, instead of running the tiling as a sweepstake and giving all sorts of decent and deserving nobodies a chance on the lucky dip. Eminent people are already usually rather well-off —and there have beeit years when, to judge by tiie actual awards, the available supply of eminence must have been running a bit thin.

That is particularly true in the case of the Prizes for Literature; literary blokes of supreme and unchallengeable excellence are not found perched in front of all the world’s many million typewriters. And when the other sort walk oil' with a Nobel Prize it only makes their brethren foam at the mouth—a reaction to which, in any event, the world of scribes is painfully prone, and one in which it ought not to be encouraged.

It xvould be much better to have A Nobel Sweepstake every now and then and give every man, woman and child a free chance in it. That would avoid the gambling element—and there would be much less ill-feeling left behind than in the case of some of tho literary awards. A good deal of U.S.A. has never forgiven Mr Sinclair Lewis for winning a Nobel Prize in 1930.

o • • s THE WORM THAT TURNED,

It Is announced that the Smithsonian Institution has acquired the fossil remains of “a worm with legs,” which is said to be 500,000,000 years old. But that may be a mistake. If the “worm with leg 3” is examined carefully, and if one of its possessions ia found to be the butt-end of an exhausted cheque-book, it may be only a payer of income tax in full flight from Mr Downie Stewart.

* * * * EGGING THEM ON.

Managers of British cinemas arß complaining with some vigour of hard times and the difficulty of making ends meet, but they do not seem, so far, to bo as hardly pressed as a picture palace in Jugo-Slavia, which is reported to bo accepting eggs and chickens and other agricultural produce from its patrons. Unless the seats cost a good deal more in Jugoslavia than they do in this country one should be able to get a pretty good place for a chicken. And anybody arriving with a Large Black Pig ought to get at least a season ticket for the rest of the year.

In some ways eggs sound the handiest item for adjusting this new rate of exchange. One egg would admit the infant to a “children’s matinee”— and let us hope that the films displayed there would be as innocent as the egg. From six to a couple of dozen would admit the hard-boiled adult, according to the value of the seat selected —and possibly the freshness of the eggs. And it might oe just as well to insist that no patron should enter the auditorium with any egg left over. If he carried a few in reserve and found that he did not appreciate tho film he might bo tempted' to bang another saxpence by throwing them at the screen.

BEETLE-CRUSHERS IN MAURITIUS.

As a contribution to the history of colonial administration it is to bo feared that the newly-issued White Paper- on the ‘‘Financial Situation of Mauritius" makes what is often described, In, a venerable formula of reproach, as “melancholy reading." But only in the conventional and strictly technical sense; some of the ac tual details tend rather to be mirthprovoking.

Take, for example, the activities of the Entomological Department of Mauritius. For twenty years it has been making war on the phytalus beetle, which preys on tho sugar cane, and in that period it has spent one million rupees on what the White Paper describes as “the executive work of catching” that parasite. Rut it must not- be supposed that this native department catches the beetl3 itself and in so doing incurs a bill which amounts Lo one-quarter of the whole expenditure of the Department of Agriculture. No; it pays other people for catching the beetles, with the interesting result that, whereas 27,000,000 specimens were slain ift I</t 1 , in j 930 the official death-roll was ’205,000,000 beetles and 137,000,000 grubs.

On these facts it Is suggested that "the destruction of phytalus has become a minor industry of Alauritius" —apparently some people are making more money by catching beetles than they could by growing sugar. This condition of affairs, complains tho While Paper, “reveals a misapprehension of the functions of government. It is not the duly of a Director of Agriculture to catch beetles’’— words that should surely be written in letters of fire on Hie heart of that harassed officer who lias lo cope with unending supplies of tiie obnoxious insect “caught by night and sold by the tinful lo the department, which pays a rapidly expanding reward for their capture."

Yet it is not, in essence, an altogether unfamiliar situation. It lna happened before that, when one pest has been introduced to suppress another, the second pest has remained to be a bigger nuisance than the first. Mauritius lias now acquired two parasites instead of one. Unce Hie beetle was Hie bugbear of the sugar-planters; now the bctlle-crushers are the burden on the whole agricultural administration.