The edible nests of swifüets, valued as a delicacy and as food for convalescents by the people of China, are bui limestone caves along special difficulties in any scheme of reform. Only one of the contracting parties makes the necessary declaration, and when this party states that there is no impediment to the marriage, he or she may be stating quite sincere ly something that is untrue, having been deceived by the other party. It is simple for a man to commit bigamy in this way. The civil authority has already more suitable machinery at its command for examining dubious cases; and there are several points in which the civil system itself could, without much difficulty, be strengthened.
The clergyman who registers a marriage is really acting as an officer of the Registrar-General, and he would be put at no disadvantage if, in regard to marriage preliminaries, he found himself occupying a similar position. If the banns system of the Church of England is considered very precious, there is no reason why it should not be maintained in an adjustment of civil preliminaries, provided that it was extended to the Nonconformist bodies if they desired it; for civil preliminaries must necessarily be uniform and even-handed all round.
it ever such a scheme came into operation it would be wrong to hope for too much from it. So far as the Church of England is concerned. it i the admission to the Holy Communion which presents a more worrying question than the right to choose which the s in many parts of the Philippines. The export of the nests is in the hands of local Chinese merchants, and although accurate statistics are dificult to obtain it has been stated that the Netherlands Indies in one year exported 109,310 kilograms of nests valued at 822,913 guilders. In only one of the Philippine Islands, Bacuit. has an attempt been made to derive municipal revenue from the trade, when the traditional ownership of the birds nest caves, which had existed for generations, was supplanted by municipal ownership ind the annual leasing of the caves to the highest bidder, says "Nature." As a reply, to this move, the Chinese ' dealers formed a ring so that the bidding, which reached 1,700 pesos in 1927, had fallen in 1936 to 500 pesos, and in a footnote to a recent paper on the subject, Canuto G. Manuel states that as no bid at all was offered in 1937, the caves have relapsed to the system of traditional ownership. From Bacuit, approximately 500 kilograms or about 100,000 nests are exported annually, but poaching of nests i-common, and attempts to limit the collecting with the view of conserving the stock have met with little success. Nest collecting, however, is a dangerous occupation, and the fact that some inaccessible caves are tenanted by the birds, provides for the survival of the swiftlet,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.