RANDOM READINGS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 556, 5 April 1913, Page 7

RANDOM READINGS.

THE JEWISH CHARACTER. Most studies of the Jewish character are vitiated, says Dr. S. Herbert, in the "Jewish Review," by the fault of attributing qualities, which are only the outcome of external circumstances and the social milieu) to an inherent racial tend : ency. Thus the assertion has often been made —and it finds apparent support in the criminal statistics—that the Jews are particularly prone to acts of fraudulence, deceit, adulteration, etc. But, while the figures cannot be contested, they are easily accounted for by two factors, both of them the "consequence of social conditions. In the first instance, it is a well-known fact that oppressed races, in their struggle for existence, have to resort to all kinds of trickery and even treachery against their conquerors. And secondly, since the. Jews have been in the diaspora, they have been forced mainly into those occupations, such as money-lending, petty trading, etc., which lend themselves most easily to such delinquencies. All we could really say against the Jew in this matter is that he seems to have a natural predilection to use his brains as a weapon instead of his fist. This aversion to acts of physical violence can also be seen in the low percentage of Jewish crimes against the person, such as murder, manslaughter, assault, etc. The same distinction comes out in another direction. While gambling, which is chiefly an intellectual vice, is rampant in -various forms among all classes of the Jewish community, drunkenness which easily leads to fights and brawls is relatively rare.

SHAPING THE BABY'S HEAD. "All Cretans bind the heads of their children when tiny in order to make them of a nice round form," says Professor C. H. Hawes, in the "Wide World Magazine." "When I was pressing home my questions in order to make quite sure of the object the mothers had in view one of them told me that J had 'a very bad head,' and that my bumps and ridges ought to have been smoothed away in my infancy. Yet, after a fairly exhaustive inquiry, I came to the conclusion that the bandaging in Crete is never tight, and lasts for so short a time that nothing is effected. In cases of deformation at birth, however, the accompanying massage probably restores the normal condition more quickly. "If there are no marked results from the head-bandaging it is otherwise with The Custom of Swaddling. It seems curious and even cruel to us to see a baby bound tight, hand and foot, and when it cries it is obvious that it is because of the awful discomfort of the prisoned feeling. Cretan mothers, however, cannot understand how we allow the baby to be restless and uncomfortable. Tightly swaddled, they say, the child lies still and contented, never able to overheat itself in hot weather by kicking and throwing its arms about, and in winter equally unable to throw off the clothes, and so expose itself. Whatever we may think of swaddling, it appears to accomplish one thing—the prevention of bandiness. One never sees a bandy-legged Cretan.

BALZAC'S METHODS OF WORK. It is always a matter of much interest to know how a great author worked. Balzac, so Mr. Frederick Lawton's "Life" of him tells us, wrote and re-wrote; he was never satisfied with what he had done, and exhausted the patience of everybody by his incessant corrections: The real work of composition, with Balzac, hardly commenced until he had a set of galley proofs. What he sent first to the printer, scribbled with his crow's quill, was a mere sketch; and the sketch itself was a sort of Chinese puzzle, largely composed of scratched-out and interpolated sentences, passages, and chapters being moved about in a curious chasse-croise, which the type-setters deciphered and arranged as they best could. Margins and intercolumnal spaces they found covered with interpolations; a long trailing line* indicated the way here and there to the destination of the inserted passages. A cobweb j was regular, in comparison to the task which the printers had to tackle in the hope of finding beginning, middle, and end. In the various presses where his books were set up, the employees would never work longer than an hour on end at his manuscript. And, the indemnity he had to pay for corrections reached sometimes the figure of 4ofr. per sixteen pages. Numei" ous were the difficulties caused on this score with publishers, editors, and printers. Balzac justified himself by quoting the examples of Chateaubriand, Ingres, and Meyerbeer in their various arts. To Buloz, of the "Revue de Paris," who expostulated, he impatiently replied: "I will give up sofr. per sheet to have my hands free. So say no more about the matter." It is true that Buloz paid him 25pfr. per sheet for his contributions. 5