FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 141, 5 September 1927, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN” THE CHINESE WAV Chinese civilisation was of the earliest, and the Occident gained much knowledge from the Orient. We may still learn from the Chinese. The Nationalist Government at Nanking offers, for instance, a lesson on expediency in raising revenue. It has decreed that the tenants of all houses shall pay two months’ rent to the Government, instead of to their landlords. Think of all the money the hard-up New Zealand Government would raise by this simple method—and think of all the owners of slum dwellings, whom it would serve jolly well right to be deprived of portion of their undeserved gains. GOING DOWN While almost everyone is going up in the air, scientists are talking of descending 30 miles into the earth, stating that the interior of this spinning globe stores heat to an amount which is 30,000,000 times greater than that stored in coal, and that it ought to be brought to the top. But apart from the slight difficulties which may be experiened in delving 30 miles by physical effort, why anticipate? Do not those people who refer to the punishment which awaits us hereafter point significantly downwards? If they are correct, we will get as much of that 30,000,00-times-greater-than-coal heat as will satisfy us in the sweet by-and-by, without bringing it to the surface now. BAD IMMIGRANTS The protests of Australians against the continued immigration of Southern Europeans can be better understood as time produces increasing evidences that the ways of the stranger are not those of the native-born. The common way of settling a quarrel in Australia has been with the fists; but since the influx of foreigners, more murderous weapons have come into use. The newcomer “draws a gun,” or “pulls a knife,’ on the person who has dared to disagree with him. Following the shooting on the Queensland cane-fields, is the case of the Italian who drew a revolver, on Saturday, in a Sydney workshop and shot dead a man who was working a circular saw. It is no wonder that law-abiding Australians look askance at some of the newer type of immigrant. THEY COME AND GO They come and go, these mechanical appliances for the curing of disease. The electric battery and the vibrator (for sixpence upwards) had their •merry day and passed away. Now ultra-violet rays are the vogue. You buy your stored sunshine or atomic or ionic energy, whichever it is, and stick it in your pocket, or against your breast-bone, to pentrate to the supposed seat of disease and wither up the evil spirit which sits enthroned there. Now the Ministry of Health issues a grave warning against the indiscriminate use of such rays, as too little is known about them. the public cannot be blamed for being fooled by ineffective remedies, for the learned medical profession has chased so many will-o’-the’wisps that the layman sometimes wonders at its credulity. The treatment of disease changes like the fashions in dress, and is as quickly abandoned, one for the other. And where disease is firmly established, the doctors are very often no further advanced than was the great physician of antiquity—Hippocrates—and some of them not so far.

THE VALUE OF BUTTER-FAT In these days of learned discussions and exhortations on calories, food values and dietetics, it should be glad news to some New Zealanders to learn that the human body, to be effectively nourished, needs, among other things, between 40 and 50 grammes of butterfat daily. When we say “some” New Zealanders, we have in mind the fact that quite a lot of them make money by the production of butter-fat, and that more than quite a lot of others are unable to eat enough of that nourishing substance because of their lack of the wherewithal with which to buy it. Dripping has to be largely the bread-covering of tlie children of the workers, and there is something pathetic in the humorous improvisation on the Lord’s Prayer by the little girl who had been given “bread-and-scrape” for tea —‘“Give us this day our daily bread, and please, Lord, put plenty of butter on it, too.” A famous medical authority has stated that the daily addition of a pint of milk and an ounce of butter to a ehilds diet produces a striking increase in physical and mental vigour. With milk at 7d a quart and butter at Is Sd a lb. in one of the world’s richest dairying countries, “Father of Six” isn’t going to notice any very striking physical and mental improvements in his brood — which emphasises the fact that butter is up another Id. a lb. this very day!