TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8351, 6 February 1907, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

A Victorian, who has recently returned to Melbourne from South Africa,said to an interviewer body who has been there for five years is anxious to stay much longer. Things in South Africa are at a very low ebb. Here is a newspaper clipping which declares that in Port Elizabeth and in other parts of South Africa, from the Cape to Delagoa Bay, men are willing to work for 3s 6d a day, which is not the equivalent of Is a day in Great Britain. I think that is a pretty accurate description of the state of affairs. The war brought a great influx of people; they were unable to find work; and now the floating population is trying to get away. Australians are employing every means to come back to their own country. In the steamer on which I made my passage back there were two stowaways; there were seven men working their passages, and there were 84 adult pasengers —nearly all Australians. It is a rarity nowadays, to find an Australian travelling to Africa, but the ships are crowded with Australians making the return voyage." The time fixed for the Colonial Conference is now fast approaching, and, in the colonies at least, public interest is already keenly excited about the prospects of preferential trade. There can be no doubt that Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and Canada are practically unanimous on this point, and the only question is what England will be prepared to do in recognition of the generous offers of assistance spontaneously made to her by her self-go-verning dependencies. The position in England as regards Tariff Reform, says an Auckland contemporary, is not yet what Mr Chamberlain and his followers hoped and even expected before the last election. But, on the other hand, it is wilful self-deception to assume, in the words of a distinguished Free Trader, who recently visited this colony, that "Tariff Reform is dead." The time is coming when other political considerations that now seem of paramount importance will be driven in to the background, ; and the necessity for preserving 1 England's commercial and industrial and securing its future, will assume the position that it ought to hold among the great political questions of the age. Two Frenchmen announce that they have discovered how to "photograph' the human voice." The announcement was made in a lecture hall in Paris. MM. Pollak and Virag are the discoverers. They had already discovered a new system of rapid telegraphy by which it was possible to transmit 40,000 words an hour, but they would probably have stopped there if M. Morage, a well-known professor, had not suggested to them that their apparatus could be adapted for other uses. In their system of telegraphy the words are perforated on strips of paper by. an instrument something like a type-writing machine. The paper is passed through a special transmitter and the perforations determine the intervals between the currents. These intervals are recorded in the receiver by a small mirror which oscillates in accordance . with the perforations and the intervals between the currents. These oscillations are noted by an instrument which photographs on a strip of paper the deflections of a ray of light which the mirror reflects from a lamp placed in front of it. On the photographic print words are written in a kind of stiff "civil service" hand. For photographing the voice of a singer or of an orator, the inventors substituted a microphone for the transmitter. The mirror vibrates just the same, and the words appear photographed on a slip of paper with the letters black and big, or small and finely-vvriten, according to the tone and accent of the speaker. Speaking "at the meeting of the University Senate at Christchurch Mr Louis Cohen said that the tendency of the senate was to see that law degrees should only ,be given after a creditable examination, and he thought the people of the colony ought to applaud the efforts of the senate in making the standards high for practitioners at the Bar. But the efforts of the university were really nullified by the law which enabled a solicitor, after practising for five y6ars, to become ipso facto a barrister of the Supreme Court. That seemed in its operation to stultify any efforts to raise the qualifications for the Bar. The Chancellor (Sir Robert Stout) said he thought the statute referred to by Mr Cohen was a very vicious one, and it had a bad effect on the legal profession. He could not understand how Parliament could insist on other professions having a high standard ' and yet pass into law such a statute as that alluded to by Mr Cohen. He was very sorry such a statute should have been passed, because he believed i;t would have a very bad effect on the legal profession in the future.