The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, November 14, 1912. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1023, 14 November 1912, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, November 14, 1912. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

A contemporary points out, and with a good deal of truth too, that school examinations are an arrant fraud as educational tests, and an affliction to thousands of nervous or sensitive children in the colony, and should be regarded as the refinement of cruelty, a process ot slow torture, and summarily abolished. The suicide of a 14-year-old school boy at Christchurch because he had “failed to pass an examination’’ is quoted as the most recent gruesome commentary on the system. Many parents can testify to the worry occasioned their children by the dread examination. The question of examinations requires careful consideration by educationalists. “Oi.u beliefs die hard,” said Dr. Milsom in the course of his address on tuberculosis at Auckland on Thursday night, says the Auckland Herald. “Consumption is not hereditary. Originally it was thought to be so. The discovery ol a tubercle bacillus has altered our views on the subject, however. The occurrence of the disease in families is due only to their greater exposure to infection. Certainly there has been very rare cases of tuberculosis discovered in the newly-born, but I have heard of only three authenticated oases. When the inheritance of consumption was denied, the belief arose that a predisposition to the disease was transmitted. I do not believe that this is the case. Statistics do not show it; animal tuberculosis does not show it; and the figures even suggest that the children of tuberculosis parents

inherit a closer average immunity.” Amoug consumptive i cases, continued Dr Milsom, the offspring of consumptives comprised per cent., and the offspring of healthy parents per cent, In view of the comparative opportunities for infection, the small difference of 9 per cent, suggested that heredity played but little part. Experiments with cattle showed, in fact, that immunity was very strongly inherited by the offspring of diseased animals.