NEWS BY MAIL.

Hokitika Guardian, 12 February 1921, Page 4

NEWS BY MAIL.

INDIA FILM' CENSORS

BOMBAY, Dec. 16

A compulsory censorship of films for exhibition in India has recently been established in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Rangoon as the result of an Act passed in 1919. The censors have been appointed from the Indian Civil Service, each censor acting independently of the others.

As already pointed out a number of films shown in Tndin have sown an injurious crop of thought in the minds <>■ highly imaginative Hindu audiences, especially' pictures depicting the discomfiture of white men and women. THYROID WONDER. NEW YORK, Dec. 16 'Scientists and welfare workers are deeply interested in the outcome of an operation performed on a 19-year-old girl, Mary Zonbec, whom the Humane Society’s agents discovered in a Chicago cellar. She is deformed in body and mind and has been kept since infancy in semi-darkness by her parents, who are ashamed of her.

The agents took the girl, who looked as if she were only 8 years old, to the American Hospital, where she was examined by several physicians, including l)r Krumholz, professor of neurology at the North-Western University.

The professor declared that the girl had been horn with an improperly developed thyroid gland (situated behind the Adam’s apple ancl responsible when atrophied before birth for sporadic cretinism, or idiocy).

Yesterday emissaries from the hospital accosted an Italian organ grinder and purchased his monkey, Balboa. The monkey was hurried to tbe hospital, where he was invited to step torward from the hinterland of evolution and contribute his gland. He was shaved, anaesthetised, and the thyroid gland was grafted on Mary /enbee. Dr Krumholz described tho operation as a simple one.

“Mary,” he said, “has the mind of an 8-year-old child, but she will now probably develop a normal mentality and gradually acquire the intelligence becoming her actual age, though she will have to be taught as an 8-years-old girl would.”

BURIED WITH HER TOYS. f BERLIN, Dee 15. J A pathetic group of Roman objects j from the tomb of a little girl of the j period of Tilicrions, 1,960 years ago, has come into the possession of the Berlin | Museum. They are in nearly as good a j state as when the child died. i A coin of Tiberius was put in the dead child’s hand, the fee to give to Charon, the ferryman, to cross to the other side of the Styx the principal river of the “Lower World.” Then the l,„ x was filled with little dolls, of wlm she had evidently been fond. She bad also loved to play at a doll’s tea party of that age. So there is a little table, and a tov silver candelabrum. She bad dressed her dolls ancl bad “made them up,” for there is the little box of cosmetics, with a picture ot a Bacclia. on the cover. Evidently the dolls descended to her from other hands, and must have been a special

treasure. She was fond of bricks, too. and her , parents put into her box some little j cubes painted in four columns, lucre are a little gold-brooch—probably one she wore at parties of the most delicate filagree work and a gold bracelet. The little girl must have been the daughter of more than ordinary parents for "she could evidenty write, since they had put in some tablets and a stylus. SHAMELESS SHORT FROCKS. SHANGHAI. Nov 30. The Chief of Police in- Shanghai has s issued an edict against the extravagant styles now worn by Chinese women, says the North China Mail. It s warns Chinese women against aping e foreign styles wit lithe display of ankles

and hare arms. i “Women’s wearing apparel.” says the edict, “is mostly too short, permitting tli eexposuro of arms and ankles. Some of the clothing is an imitation of foreign styles, making the wearer neither foreign nor Chinese. The wearers are devoid of shame and frequent public streets without embarrassment. “In future all such women will be arrested and fined.”