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WHILE WATCHING ON TELEVISION RECENTLY the impeccably‐organized funeral procession of Sir Winston Churchill pass through streets well‐known to me during my ten years' residence in London shortly after the turn of the century, I could not help regretting that so little of the memorable proceedings had been assigned by the organizers to anything pertaining to Scotland. It came as a relief, therefore, to hear the wild notes of the bagpipes blown on the wind during the embarkation of the flag‐draped coffin at Tower Pier. I find that this reaction has been shared by other Scottish listeners.

THE problem of the busy professional woman who, willy‐nilly, has to turn out to business every day in the week, lies not so much in deciding what books she shall read, as in finding time to read anything at all beyond the necessary daily newspaper. So many women have to start another day's work—woman's work—on returning home in the evening after the nominal day's work—man's work—is over. In the writer's case, between running a house, snatching time for shopping, gardening, taking the dog for a run, entertaining friends occasionally, and being entertained, the evenings fly with astonishing rapidity, and the only time for reading is time when one ought to be in bed. When one adds a hobby which entails a lot of home correspondence, there can't be much spare time for serious or any other kind of reading.

MY TITLE IMPLIES THAT STRONG language has a therapeutic value. I am not suggesting that foul language for its own sake, or foul language used out of habit, should be condoned, but I do assert that—in given circumstances—the use of swear‐words can relieve tension and frequently prevent physical violence.

IN all this rush for bargains in first editions, and the feverish anxiety on the part of many collectors, pseudo and genuine, there is a natural desire to look ahead, and to discover the big writers of to‐morrow, because it is their books of to‐day that will be the rare and valuable items of to‐morrow. But there's the conundrum It is easy enough, if we are rich enough, to buy, shall we say, Arnold Bennett's Old Wives Tale for £50 or more, because we are constantly learning how few copies there are about, and because it is really a good first edition to have. The same may be said of the rare things of Shaw, Barrie, Wells, Galsworthy and others. To select an unknown writer, and to say to oneself: his first book is going to be a notable and closely sought for book to‐morrow, is, indeed, a difficult task which few of us can encompass. Yet it is done. There are those happy ones who said it about Shaw in his early days, of Tomlinson in his, and they now possess real worth in two ways. I do not ever want to forget the literary value of these, and other writers: there is, indeed, value there; but there is the other way—the economic value. Some wiseacres, in their shrewd vision and intelligent and intellectual anticipation, hug themselves in bibliographic glee in that these two ways are theirs. Fads and fashions, conventions and popularisms, come up and pass these good people by. They blazed their own trail, and, in their quiet and contented way, they proceeded to their own contented end, and now they may justifiably revel in their own fore‐sightedness. Blessed are they among the growing army of book collectors.

This chapter examines the inauguration of the university study of Education in Scotland and its relation to teacher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The chapter outlines moves to establish Education as a disciplinary field in higher education and the junctures at which this movement aligns with and is in tension with concurrent moves to advance teaching as a profession. Academisation and professionalisation are the twin poles of this debate. This is not a parochial or obsolete debate. The place of teacher preparation in higher education has been the focus of sustained discussion across Anglophone nations. Three examples – the inauguration of chairs and lectureships, the governance of teacher education and deliberation on the content and purpose of a degree in Education – are used to help explain the apparent paradox between the historic place of education in Scottish culture and identity and the relatively recent full involvement of Scotland's universities in the professional preparation of teachers. Investigating the activities of the first academic community of educationists in Scotland may help to understand continuing struggles over jurisdiction and authority in this contested and yet neglected field.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE is notoriously afflicted by a high infant mortality rate. Literary magazines in particular seem to exhibit all the survival instincts of a claustrophobic lemming. It is therefore a special pleasure to see an avowedly ‘bookish’ magazine—and a Scottish one at that—celebrate its fiftieth birthday. Fifty years of a Scottish literary periodical! It is rather like running up a cricket score at football. Even more extraordinary is the fact that these fifty years have been achieved under only two editors. R. D. Macleod, the founding editor, ran the magazine for 37 years, while his successor, W. R. Aitken, has been in charge for, as he puts it, ‘a mere 13’.

The Milk and Dairies (Scotland) Order, 1925.—This Order, framed under Section 12 of the Act, and applying to Scotland as a whole, was issued along with the model dairy byelaws. It prescribed the form of register of dairies and dairymen, and contained provisions for the ascertainment of infectious disease at dairies, for the prevention of contamination of milk at railway stations, on the street, by means of unsuitable conveyances or unsuitable surroundings, or through insulticient protection from dust or exposure. The colouring or thickening of cream was prohibited by the Order; me use of wooden vessels, except for buttermilk, was prohibited; milk vessels for transit were required to nave marked on them the name and address of the owner, to have a proper lid, and to be locked or sealed. The Order also filled a gap in the administrative provisions of the Act by requiring every person about a dairy, if he became aware that any person in his household was suffering from an infectious disease, to notify the dairyman immediately. The dairyman must then notify the medical officer of health.

Few will complain that 1974 has not been an eventful year; in a number of significant respects, it has made history. Local Government and National Health Services reorganizations are such events. This is indeed the day of the extra‐large authority, massive monoliths for central administration, metropolitan conurbations for regional control, district councils corresponding to the large authorities of other days; and in a sense, it is not local government any more. As in other fields, the “big batallions” acquire greater collective power than the total sum of the smaller units, can wield it more effectively, even ruthlessly, but rarely appearing to take into account the masses of little people, the quiet people, who cannot make themselves heard. As expected, new names of authorities are replacing the old; new titles for departments and officers, ambitious and high‐sounding; a little grandiose for the tongues of ordinary folk. Another history‐making event of 1974, in the nature of a departmental transfer but highly significant for the course of future events as far as work in the field is concerned, was handing over of the personal health services—health of expectant mothers, babies, children, domiciliary midwifery, the school health services and their mainly medical and nursing personnel—from local health authorities to the newly created area health authorities. The public health departments over fifty years and more had created them, built them up into the highly efficient services they are. If anything can be learned from the past, new authorities are always more expensive than those they replace; they spend freely and are lavish with their accommodation and furnishings. In their first few months of existence, the new bodies have proved they are no exception. News of their meetings and activities in many areas is now scanty; even local newspapers which usually thrive on Council news—or quarrels—seem to have been caught on the wrong foot, especially in the small towns now merged into larger units. The public are relatively uninformed, but this doubtless will soon be rectified.

THE regular search for the good book for the child will continue so long as there are children's libraries. A recent report on an enquiry has reached us from Bethnal Green and follows the familiar lines of getting the children to vote on what they like; with the result that the “William” books, which should be making all concerned in their production a fortune, head the list, and the simple “small”‐child books, the Milly‐Molly, Mandy series, come next. The field surveyed was small, for “William” polled only 34 votes; only 800 of the 6,000 children registered as borrowers participated. It is questionable if such enquiries, however much they interest us as librarians, can effectively help to improve child reading, unless some method of finding and providing high literature in the type the youngsters prefer can be devised. Mr. George F. Vale prefaces his brief list of books chosen with a really interesting discussion on the subject, but a quotation from it indicates part of the problem. He writes, speaking of Tom Sawyer, Alice and The Wafer Babies, “What elements go to make a permanent children's book is one of the mysteries of literature, but evidently these books possess some quality which overrides all the chances and changes of time. It is not merely the appeal of a good story; there are many better stories than The Water Babies. The secret seems to be some mysterious rapport between the author's mind and that of the readers, an ability to see and to think upon the level of the child mind.” All this is true, but it is more than that, we think; it is the power of recording what is, has been or may be, within the child's own range of experience; that is, it is true in that it realises the conditions of the world of childhood. It is curious, and possibly significant, that a book for children in these enquiries means a story. An enquiry is overdue into the type and quality of non‐fiction read by them, the sort of child who reads and in what circumstances: Real information here might reveal gaps and surpluses in book provision that are not now widely recognized!

It is remarkable how few cases in any outbreak are attended by a fatal issue, and pathological data from post‐mortem examinations are correspondingly meagre. The clinical symptoms point to the upper intestinal tract as the area most affected, and this is in accordance with the findings at necropsy. The severe vomiting and purging must remove much of the unabsorbed toxic material within the alimentary canal, and the rapid recovery in many cases is presumably the beneficial result of these excretory processes. It would be expected that the cases presenting evidence of infection with living organisms would show more prolonged symptoms than in those in which only toxins are present, but in most cases recovery occurs rapidly, and evidence of invasion of the blood stream by organisms is seldom obtained. Nevertheless, the development of aggultinins to salmonella organisms is frequently reported, even in cases in which toxins only are supposed to have been present. As it is the general experience of bacteriologists that it is extremely difficult to produce antibodies in the blood of animals by administering organisms by the alimentary tract, and is only partially successful when enormous doses are given, and frequently only after starvation or in association with the feeding of agents which interfere with normal digestion, this finding of aggultinins in the blood of food‐poisoning cases is the more remarkable and worthy of fuller investigation on experimental lines.