PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2896, 15 September 1909, Page 5

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturdays Daily Times.) About Dr Cook and the North Pole I am in two minds, equal and opposite. I believe, and yet— alas my unbelief ! Dr Cook ie an ambiguous person. His name is Cook, and also his name is Koch ; he hails from New York, and also he is claimed by Frankfort on the Main ; he is an American, he is a German, and' al6O he is a Jew. But it is not because of thsse trivial ambiguities (assigned him by newspaper gofesip, and entirely consistent with honesty) that he has been investigated by a sanhedrim of journalists, 60 of them, including a Times commissioner and that expert in the occult, Ma- W. T. Stead. It is the casual and the unpremeditated in Dt Cook that puts a strain on faith. He "had no definite idea, of going to the Pole, but finding the Eskimos' dogs' ready he started." The sight of means to do great deeds made great deeds dome. Other men going on the same errand have gone in organised parties, long prepared and carefully equipped. Dr Cook just " happens along," and goes alone. Other men have tried and missed, times and oft. Dr Cook makes a bull'seye first shot. To prove that he had been there, and as a guarantee of good faith, he " deposited a sealed tube on the place where the Pole was located," and any- i body who doubts is at liberty to go and find it. But the place appears to have been " among ice drifting eastward." i These features of fche case are not exactly i faith-inspiring. On the other hand, the staggering fact that an achievement long and vainly desiderated is announced twice within a week, first by Cook, then by Peary, may be paralleled. Bleriot and Latham flew the Channel almost simultaneously, though one of them fell into the F-ea a mile short of Dover pier. The planet Neptune, nearly as hard to find as the Pole, was sootted simultaneously in En-gland and in France. Also, the dec- ! t<rine of natural selection was announced simultaneously by Darwin and by Wallare. The one out stand in or fact that makes for immediate fnith in Dr Cook is his ]<W> ascent of the mor-+vot«s M^unt M'Kinley, 20.300 ft hi^h. Bnf for that, nobody would at this stage believe him in ihe least. The fact that the honour of the first cross-Channel flight, along with the Daily Mail £1000 prize, falls to a Frenchman has set all the frogs of the marsh in choTiis — oroak. croak, croak, — Mr H. G. Wells, socialist and pessimist, leading off. That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is not a fact by itself. The arrival of M. Bleriot suggests most horribly to me how far behind we must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance. The foreigner is ahead of us in education, croaks Mr Wells ; — his science is better than ours ; his training is better than ours ; his imagination is livelier ; his mind is more active. And so on, ad nauseam, in abject self-depreciation. There are people, I suppose, with whom this grovelling passes for patriotism of the more enlightened sort. Then I prefer the less enlightened, and pray Heaven to keep us still a little in the dark. It is certain that our place in the world is the envy of other nations. — our commerce, our extent of empire, our naval might — and that it is to cut our comb and abate, our superiority that we are menaced with war. An respects airships, it was an English newspaper, the Daily Mail, that offered the £1000 pri/p which a Frenchman has won ; and in handing it over the same paper remarks that '•Jon<{ supremacy arH unrivalled success have made us a trifle indolent and more than a trifle complar^nt." But it does not follow ihat we have really lost time. Says the Paris, correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette, "John Bull has acted a prudent part. Sitting on the fence, if not a glorious position, is at lt-ast on-p useful in practical affair?. Tt enables one to jump down at the last moment and tpav the benefit of the ot'h^r fellow's experience." A French officer has just remarked to me- "Tin* Briti«h X'avy for years ap■nearerl indifferent to the submarines, now her under- wafer fleet is thp finest in the world. In the same way Eneland will doubtless c(iuip herself at the proper

time with an overhead fleet. For the moment, the perfectly reliable aerial motor is yet fco seek." The Frogs in Aristophanes are a merry tribe. Iheir " brek-ek-ek-ex coax coax " has something of satire, but nothing of gloom or of doom. lam for squashing all irogs, British or other, that cannot croak to the Aristophanes tune. An encouraging outbreak of patriotism occurred in the City Council the other night, but seems to have ended in a fizzle. Resolutions to the following effect, in the interest of Volunteering, were mooted, cold-shouldered, and postponed :—: — That preference in the use of the City reserves be given to such athletic clubs as make Volunteering a condition of membership. laat proprietors of sports grounds Ije asked to adopt the same rule. That Volunteering be enforced on all unmarried men employed by the council if under 30 years of age. These well-meant resolutions err by defect. They should have been preceded by another of the following tenor :—: — That no one sit in this Council, or be eligible for election ther«to, who has not qualified by membership in a Volunteer company. Physician, heal thyself. Let the council take its own medicine. And, as respects the men in its employment, the notion that Volunteering, hitherto voluntary, may be made compulsory and yet remain Volunteering, is an attractive paradox. But it should be reserved for the Wise Men of Gotham. Lord Roberts, seeking the same end, has a much neater way with him. Not compulsion, only persuasion, but persuasion of a peculiarly compelling eort. In a recent speech at Bristol he advised young- women " not to play tennis and ! other sports with men not qualified to I serve their country." The same principle would rule the ballroom. There, as elsewhere, " the shirker should have to I reckon with gome form of social disparagement." This is a region in which high-minded women could exercise the power of their sex with irresistible force. '' Our dance, I think." " I'm sorry, but I hear you haven't done your drills." The carpet knight would soon be eliminated by the khaki catechism. Beyond any doubt the women could persuade the men ; but there remains the question, who can ■ persuade the I women ? <• The presumption is that the • i carpet knight and the belle of the ball. I will prove each the other's counterpart ; j that to-night they will dance and spoon in sensuous content, and to-morrow wit 1 meet where — Tlfey pitch some white pavilion, and lustily even fhe odds, With nets and hoops and mallets, with rackets and bats and rods, i Before the service of the country is set higher than «uch things as these we shall need to have entered on the Spectator's " New Way of Life." And by the time the women are willing to persuade the I men, the men will need no persuading. Letters to the editor are for publica- . tion merely ; letters to this column are for comment. Being a merciful -man, I I usually withhold the names of my correI spondents, and so feel the fretr to beat them about the head, if discipline in that form should eeem necessary. But any little interest possessed by the screed I give below — a dyspeptic outpouring against the Medical School of the University of New Zealand — lies in the sisnaturt. It is the signature of a medical practitioner writing from the rustic retreat of Balclutha. The interrogatories that express his discontent nobody need be at tht, trouble to answer. And the only comment needed is that i there is little love lost among doctors. Dear " Civis," — Since you have become a partisan in the medical quarrel that has been going on recently, I should like to ask you the following questions: — Do the patients in the hospitals benefit by this Medical School? Do the students benefit by it ? f Is there any other place in the civilised world where a tiny town of barely 60,000 inhabitants runs a complete Medical School? Is there any justification for running a Medical School by general practitioners when the fees that go to line their pockets would more than pay the travelling expenses of the students to England or America? j Isn't it better for each special subject j [ to be taught by a proper specialist? I Isn't the whole business a grate«que practical joke at the expense of students and patients alike? Didn't the founders of your Medical School trade a little unfairly on the Scotchman's love of a university and his natural desire to make Dunedin a second Edinboro' "> Can an adequate supply of cases be procured for the proper teaching of either medicine, surgery, or midwifery? Could a tiny community like Dun«din possibly keep a good second-rate physi.ian or surgeon, much less a single firstrate one' I«n't it absolutely dishonest of v? to attempt to retain a Medical School in our midst v/hen we have got neither the teachers nor the ra=es that, are required to make even a had second-rate Medical School? Doesn't the very existence of such a school make ua appear ridiculous in the eyei of all rigM-mindcd men? Why do you oppose a chair of Domestic Economy, a subject which they could teach, and yet support chaira of medicine, surgery, and midwifery, suh-^ jects which they can't? Don't these very 'paragons of -whom you seem so proud have to go Home themselves to be taught? Do we send a single serious case Tequiring special treatment to Dunedin, if but time and their Dockets permit of their going Home? — Yours faithfully, Leslie B. Btjbnett. BaJclutha, September 6, 1909. After this copious discharge of bile, Dr Burnett, let us hope, will feel relieved. Apropos de bottes — that is, •£ the

doctors and their amiability — let ma bring in a long ago medical scandal just «xhumed and dissected by a Dr Eaymond Craw fur d, whose book on the subject is reviewed in The Times' literary supple-ment-rthe death of King Charles 11. H you caift convict of the scandalous your contemporaries, which is the pastime in .Dunedin, the. next best ththg is to convict your , predecestors. This is what Dr Cravpiurd " Has* been at, and it seems to . have yielded him very fair sport. Charles II died in his 54th year, after an illness of five days. He had in attendance fourteen doctors, each and all of them totally unable to say. what was the matter with him. That' ~is the scandal. , Amongst their gu&sses were epilepsy, apoplexy, poisou'J arid " a sort of intermittent fever." A post mortem yielded no newt>r light. What the King died of hat ' remained an unsolved problem. To the faculty, that is. To anybody tlse the case should seem, abundantly plain. The poor King's sickroom was thronged by a multitude of people- — statesmen, ambassadors, bishops, watching day and night; and b&sides these the fourteen physicians who werf "on the job." As Macaulay says they tortured the King like an Indian at the stake. No fewer than fourteen formidable and revolting mixtures' were ordered the first day, in -addition to cupping, venesection, scarification with the cautery, blistering all over his shaved head, and sneezing powders. Goa stone, Oriental Bezoar stone, and Spirit of Human Skull figure among the ingredients of their physic The malady of which Charles II died— says Dr Raymond Crawfurd, speaking with all the authority of modern science — was " granular kidney with uraemia." He is quite wrong. What the King die<f of was his fourtetn physicians I am much pestered by propoundera of riddles, puzzles, and problem-catches., The tedium of life in the back-blocks 1 should have assumed as thb cause, were it not that I see the London weeklies giving up whole pages to these vanities. The. demand for them is evidently widespread. As a .concession to appetite I give a specimen problem from the Westminster Gazettt., and along with it a number of answers more or lev? serious. A man -went into a shop and bought » pair .of boots for 14s. He put them on, and said he would leave the boots he had worn to he mended. He then tendered » sovereign in payment. The shoeni-aker . "having' no change, went out to the baker across 'the' way and" changed the sovereign for silverr " He gave his customer '6s, but forgot to ask to what address he should send the old boots when mended. Ten " minutes later the- baker 'cam*., in .with the- sovereign, which was "Bad, demanding a pound in good money. How much did the shoemaker lose? 1. 6s and boots. Shoemafier had 203 from baker, of which _he gave 6s to customer. He must make this 6a good. Boots went for nothing. Of course he • had the old. boots. The old boots will not be -mentioned again. This answer commonly held correct. 2. 30s. Had sovereign been good, 9hoemaker would have - lost nothing. "What he lost can therefore be measured by the difference between a good sovereign and a bad sovereign, which is 20s. 3. 26s and boots. 'To the baker he lost 20s, to the customer he lost 6s and boots; total, 26s and boots. A. Boots. He parted with boots for nothing— .viz., a bad sovereign. The 6b, which be gave to ' customer he got f ronJ baker, so that he did not lose it. He only gave baker back what he bad taken N from him, so that he did not loee anything there. Therefore he only lost boats. 5. Nothing. Customer's sovereign good to shoemaker, since shoemaker got 20s for it from baker. He therefore lost nothing to customer, being paid in virtually good coin .for his boots. To baker he gave back only what he received. 6. 6s. He lost 6s to customer, which he must make good to baker. The boot? ■were not given, but sold. 7. 90s «nd boots. He had to m»k6 good a bad sovereign, and had given away the boots for coin of no value. I IC.B. — These are all the answers known to reason. Those who like this kind of thing wilT find here just the kind of thing 1 theylike and I leave them to exercise, their teeth upon it. Civis. i The mail which was despatched from Dun* j edin, via Brindisi. on July 29 arrived itt London on the night of the 4th inst. Mr Wragge telegraphs to the Mataura Ensign the following from Hokirika:— *' A! big storm is in operation in the sun, the main nucleus being about 23,000 miles in 1 diameter, and the whole disturbed region about 100,000 miles long. Further seismic and volcanic action may be expected, witK electric and magnetic disturbances. Watch the cablegrams. The disturbance named Anchises caused the Gisborne floods and the latest rains in the North Island. Hid influence is not yefc negative, and further developments are looked for." At last week's meeting of the Bruc« County Council it was reported that th^ committee appointed to am«nd the by-law* in connection with motor traffic within th« bounds of the county, had gone fully intrf the matter, and would be prepared to bring forward its proposals at the next meeting of the council. , During the night of the 6th (writes our+ correspondent) the Bluff Harbour Boardj rock-breaker sank at her moorings at tW west end of the wharf, and is now lying iflf about 20ft of water. The engines and ton gearing will have to be removed before i* can be get to the surface, so it will no% be in working order for some time yetfej The acoident must have arisen from leakage and not collision. The Harbour Board' diver is now busily engaged plugging up. the leaks.. *>