PUBLIC OPINION.

Hokitika Guardian, 7 March 1928, Page 1

PUBLIC OPINION.

WANTED—LESS SMOKE: Electricity and gas have already don.' much in private bouses, but there is more to .be done. Factory smoke can be avoided by improved methods of combustion, and by preliminary treatment ot crude coal, extracting tile valuable products, and burning only the rest. If Sir John Cadman, Bone, and a few other experts collaborated with Mr Neville Chamberlain as, for all I know, may be happening already) much could be accomplished. Now that people are beginning to realise the healthiness of unobstructed sunshine they will not much longer be willing to foul the air of towns.”—Sir Oliver Lodge, in the “ Weekly Dispatch.” GOODWILL ON BOTH SIDES. “The men of goodwill,” says the London “ Daily Telegraph.” on both sides are now to have another chance with their policy of industrial co-opera-tion, and no more promising sign is ;discernible in the economic heavens | titan the fact that the General Council of the Trades Union Congress and a group of powerful and public-spirited employers are to meet shortly in the conviction that ‘the common interests jwhieh hind them are more powerful than tlie apparently divergent interests which; seem to separate.’ That offers 4he brightest promise of the New Year, and even if it issues in no general formal agreement, as signed and sealed between the two parties, we may reasonably expect that it will lead to far- ! reaching agreements in many individual industries. The supreme task of 1928 is to clear up the post-war industrial battlefields and give British industry its chance.” WAR EUROPE THE EDEN? “ No branch of knowledge, however, is extending its range so rapidly as heredity, hut another side which appeals to me enormously is the history of man and how he came to reach his present position. In the current issue of ‘ Nature.’ for example, is reported one of the biggest discoveries of its kind ever made in Europe concerning human origin. A German geologist, who has for some years been collecting fossils at a certain site near Heidelberg, and whose efforts had already yielded the Heidelberg jaw. a relic about the earliest human European w know, has not only found further part- •' of that man, but also two great nnthrn poid apes—one of a very human type. There thus really seems a chtnice tha, Germany is going to produce to ■ missing link,’ and it -begins' to hrd ; very much, after all. as though Europewas the ‘ Garden of Eden.’ ’’—Sir Arthur Keith, in the “'Sunday Times.' WHEN NATURE INTERVENES. “ All inventions become impotent when nature chooses. The steampacket cannot get out of harbour, the railway train is as helpless in a snowdrift as the stage coach, the motor-ear skids into the frozen ditch, the telephones are dumb with broken wires. , the aeroplanes cannot I 'see their way. Wayfarin’s-'dii? of weariness and cold : houses, Tillages, towns, go 'short ot food. We have to dig ourselves- out. we must manage our nffnifs by manpower and pack-horse, as they di’tf a thousand years ago’.”—“ T)nilv graph.” '