Men and Women.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIX, Issue XIII, 18 September 1897, Page 391

Men and Women.

QUEEN VICTORIA, it is calculated, has now spent more time in Scotland than many kings and queens who ruled Scotland alone. In fact, Her Majesty’s spring and summer sojourns in the Highlands since 1842 make an aggregate of about eighteen years. The honeymoon is fashionable ; therefore every newly married pair must go on their honeymoon. But a honeymoon is an expensive luxury. The expense of a month’s holidaying—for two—is something to be seriously considered. It is told of a young doctor who was married recently, but had not much money to come and go on, that he hit upon the following plan to appease the bride and society without incurring expense. He didn’t explain bis position to the girl—it is not always safe or easy to do that —and he didn’t go to the money lenders. He simply fixed upon Paris as the best place in the world to have a honeymoon, and they started off, amidst the good wishes of a gay crowd of friends. When they reached the first station the stationmaster gave him a telegram informing him that his presence was urgently required in town, and back they had to go; but it appeared that he didn’t give up his tickets, and a week or

so later the wife found in his pocket two tickets for the place at which their trip had been interrupted, bearing the date of their wedding day. They set her thinking, and when he came home he confessed tbe truth, and they have since loved each other better than ever. It was a plan pre-arranged with a friend at home, and it satisfied the demands of society.

A French scientist of note maintains that a large number of the nervous maladies from which girls suffer are to be attributed to playing the piano.

Domestic servants are so scarce in Montreal that ladies in want of help are said to visit the gaol with a view to engaging young women to work for them at the close of their terms of imprisonment.

Kipling’s Canadian tariff poem doesn’t please Canada at all. His reference to that country as * The Lady of the Snows,* says the Montreal Gazette, * is calculated to give possible British emigrants to Canada a chilly feeling that they had better go somewhere else.’ Mrs Lewis, who discovered manuscripts of the gospel in a Syriac convent on Mount Sinai, has been exploring the convent again in company with her sister, Mrs Gibson, and has examined two Palestinian Syriac ser-vice-books of the twelfth century, written in the dialect

supposed to have been spoken by Christ. Their tex will soon be published.

The proportion of women among centenarians is, it is said, nearly twice that of men. A group of people cited by one of the most careful and least credulous of the numerous authors of works on the subject shows that out ot 66 persons who were 100 years old and upward, there were 43 women to 23 men. In London the last census showed 21 centenarians, 5 men to 16 women. The fact that nearly all the centenarians were poor seems to prove that the rich are at some disadvantages in the matter of long life. Of the female centenarians, it may he said that tne very nature of their occupation protects them by keeping them so much in the house, where they are shielded from adverse influences of atmospheric changes and accidental causes of death, to which so many men are subject.

The dinner service used at the table of the Queen is solid gold, down to the last detail. The entrtSe dishes are double, square, and very heavy. Their contents are kept warm by small gold lamps between the outer and inner dishes in which a wick burns amid white wax. This dinner service, which numbers more than 1,000 pieces, was made by order of George IV. There are said to be in France 2,150 women authors and journalists, and about 700 women artists. The provinces contribute most of the writers—about two thirds —while Paris is represented in the same proportion among the artists. Among the writers 1,000 are novelists, 200 are poets, 150 educational writers, and the rest writers of various kinds. The artists comprise 107 sculptors, and the others are painters, ranging over all branches of the pictorial art.

Having had experience with one woman, the widower knows how to select a good-tempered, neat, faithful helpmeet, and beyond that all the rest is easy. Being good-tempered, she quickly adapts herself to his ways. Being neat, she keeps his house and his linen in a state of apple-pie order. And being faithful, she makes personal trips to the butcher, and the baker, and the candlestick maker. There are no more badly cooked meals, with muddy coffee, soggy bread, and miserable potatoes. When he comes home at night his room is cheerfully lighted, and his slippers and smoking jacket are laid near at hand. Opposite him at the table a bright-faced wife chirps a pleasant accompaniment to the meals that have been all too lonely during the past weary months, and when he goes to the church or to the theatre he has a well-dressed woman by his side, to whom it is a pleasure to present people as *my wife.’ It doesn’t cost much to support a wife of modest desires, and the widower, if he has his eyes wide open, looks to it that the second woman of his choice be not extravagant. Report is made of a most interesting surgical operation performed at Parma, Italy, by Professor Camillo Verdelli, in the presence of all the physicians of the Parmese Hospital and with very satisfactory results. The operation was nothing less than the washing of a youth’s heart—the first of the kind, the washing apparatus employed being one lately invented by Professor Riva. After making the necessary incision, Professor Verdelli first cleaned the pericardium of the patient, a twelve-year-old boy, of the pus which had there accumulated, and then proceeded to wash the heart with a strong solution of soda biborate—borax. The attendant success wasindicated by the fact that no further complication arose, the boy doing well, and at once advancing to complete recovery, and it is stated that the eminent professor has received numerous appreciative communications relating to his skill from surgeons all over Europe. Lord Salisbury is the holder of five acres of land near Charing Cross, London, which his ancestors obtained 250 years ago for grazing lands at the rate of 10 shillings an acre for 500 years. It is now worth millions of pounds. The ingenious device used by Dr. Max Einhorn for obtaining samples of the stomach contents is of the size of a small peanut with an open incurved rim (says the Medical Record}. The patient swallows it readily, and after five minutes it is withdrawn by the silk thread to which it is attached and the contents submitted to examinations. Patients do not complain of it, as most do of the stomach tube.

A series of experiments was reported bv C. F. Dodge, at a recent meeting of the American Physiological Society. Alcohol in moderate doses was given to a pair of kittens ; at the end of ten days they contracted severe colds, while the other two kittens were in good condition*. The alcoholic pair attained only thirty-nine per cent, and sixty-three per cent, of the weight of the nonalcoholic pair. Of two pairs of spaniels, the alcoholic pair weighed less, and, as tested by the pedometer, developed only seventy-one and fifty-seven per cent, of the activity of the normal pair ; in chasing after and bringing balls, tbe efficiency of tbe former amounted to only thirty-two and forty-four per cent., the male being the subject of this experiment.