PERSONAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 120, 29 August 1910, Page 5

PERSONAL.

Mr. J. C. Cooper says that if it is tin wish of the electors he will offer himself ngain as a candidate for the Pahiatua seat.

(Mr. Cecil F. Lewis, for several years Government valuer in the Giflborne district, died yesterday afternoon, after a fewt days' illness. Bronchitis, supervening on influenza, was the cause of death.

Mr. James Sole, of Westown, who came out with his 'brothers by the Oriental, arriving on November 18, 1841, celebrated his ninety-second birthday on Sunday. This old gentleman is still well and hearty.

A Press Association cable message from . clbourne announces the death of the Yuv Rev. Goorge Oakley Vance, Dean o: Melbourne. The cause of death was pneumonia. The deceased was a native of London, eighty-two years of age, and was ordained in Melbourne fifty-eight years ago. He was prominently connected for many years with education in Victoria.

•Professor Baillie-Balfour, who occu pies the chnir of botany at Edinburgh University, writing to a friend in Christchurch, states that Mr. Peter McCallum, (formerly a student at Canterbury College, obtained brilliant results in botany at the summer session. "He has swept the hoard, and has taken all the prizes and medals, ,".nd stands out by himself above all the other men," the professor says.

The shareholders present at the annual meeting of the Taranaki Producers' Freezing Works Company on Saturday passed a resolution sympathising with the chairman of directors,' Mr. A. Morton, in his illness, and expressing a hope that he would soon recover his usual health. Mr. Conni'tt. who moved the resolution, paid a tvMmte to the ability displayed by Mr. Morton in the conduct of the business of the company. Mr. J. B. Connett, during the progress of Saturday's meeting of dairy companies' representatives, made reference to the great loss to the dairying industry caused by the enforced retirement of Mr. J. W. Foreman from the directorate of the Freezing Works Company and other kindred associations. The directors of this concern had felt his loss very much, but Mr. Foreman's medical advisers had been insistent upon his giving up the portion, having regard to the state of his health.

The Auckland Star states th&fc the reason for the resignation of Bwfcop Neligan was tliat he had several warnings, through temporary collapses; in 1000, and on May oth of this year he had a paralytic seizure, although mercifully it was a ease of transient paralysis, and the doctors in consultation were that the Bishop must not, by continuance of work necessarily involving continuous strain, risk recurrence of the paralysis, and therefore insisted upon his resignation. Mr. Wolf Harris, head of the firm "'of 'Bang, Harris and Co., apart from'his recent gift of the buildings and the ground at Anderson's Bay, Dunedin, on which the Kartyane Home stands, gave £•2000 for the endowment of the Chair of Physiology at the Otago University; he presented the Harris fountain in the Triangle, and has been a liberal contributor to the funds of the Dunedin Hebrew congregation. When the editor of the Dunedin Star was in England last year Mr. Harris intimated his willingness to present his portrait to the city. That he has now done. A very fine old painting by Peattie. a Scottish A.R.A., is to be hung up in the reference room of the public library. Mr. Robert Aitken, one of the oldest pastoral and agricultural settlers in Southland, died on Monday at the age*' of eighty-three, leaving behind him the memory of a most honourable and veil spent life (says the Times). He was born in Tasmania, and brought up to, agricultural and pastoral pursuits. Hie father was one of the first settlers who came out to Tasmania in the early part of the nineteenth century under the system of land grants to gentlemen of good property, under which the immigrants received grants in proportion to their capital. Mr. Aitken landed first with live stock at either Nelson or Marl'borough, and travelled south by the east coast down to Otago and Southland. He came to Southland about 1862 with his family, and took up the Clifden station, just west of the Waiau, where the sust pension bridge now is. Here he made a very comfortable home amidst some of the most picturesque scenery in New Zealand, and became a very "successful breeder of live stock—sheep, cattle, and horses. \