Paris is not so busy with the war that it cannot think out fashions for the spring (if ever that comes; in the present bitter cold it seems unthinkable) We are told that spring dresses will be on simple lines, but will cling and sparkle and may have gay trimmings. Hats are to be dis-by Mr. Munnings, R.A., the well known painter of horses. He says that bread made of flour ground between steel rollers is uneatable.
Retired colonels and admirals in country districts write in support. The bread sold by most bakers, they declare, is pale anemic stuff, the mere ghost of real bread, which can only be produced by stone-ground flour. Now "The Times" reports the invention, by a father and son named Clark, of a milling machine whic is to revolutionize the whole art of bread making. Its virtue is that it preserves all those life-giving properties in the wheat berry which modern high-pressure methods of milling would appear to be expressly designed to destroy.
It is curious how the public flourish for years in ignorance upon foods in which science eventually unmasks an insidious foe. I can remember wher certain doctors declared that marmalade—this was at the time wher ihe so-called Oxford marmadale with pieces of very thick rind in it, was at the height of its fame—was the most fertile source of dyspepsia. Now the Government is importing, or allowing to be imported vast quantities of Seville oranges, and more or less bribing us to make marmalade by special grants of sugar to those who do.
People who have eaten bread made of stone-ground flour tell me it is indeed very good. But how many converts Mr. Munnings will make is doubtful Grinding your own flour and baking your own bread is an excellent pastime for wealthy R.A/'s with large country houses, but not for those who have to catch the 7.22, the 8.15, or even the 9.50. So we must just go on poisoning ourselves, A Word For Civilization You have perhaps heard of the 21 pilgrims who are setting out from San Francisco to live on an uninhabited island of West Caicos, wherever they are. I believe Great Britain partly owns the island, but then few of us know what the British Empire contains. (Turn up the Statesman's Year Book and you will be amazed.) I daresay the climate of the West Caicos is rather different from what we are having in Europe. Yesterday the papers simultaneously reported 100 degrees of frost in Finland and a heat wave with several resultant deaths in Buenos Aires.
But in any weather what is the real attraction of desert islands? "George said he thought the trouble with desert islands was that they were so damp. But Harris said, No, not if properly drained." Dampness, however, is not the only drawback.
The San Francisco pilgrims say that they wish to get away from taxes, telephones, newspapers, the madding crowd, and be back with Nature. They may, But for most of us Na.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.