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Elsewhere in this issue we review the First (Interim) Report of the Joint Survey of Pesticide Residues in Foodstuffs, published by the Association of Public Analysts (Editor: Mr. D. G. Forbes, B.Sc., F.R.I.C.). The Scheme, planned with meticulous care and executed with the best spirit of co‐operation, sets a pattern for this type of investigation; there are other problems which could be studied in the same manner. Such a response from the bodies representing the major local authorities of the country and their food and drugs administrations—inspectors, food sampling officers, public analysts—is evidence of the concern felt over this particular form of contamination of food. It constitutes a public health problem of world‐wide dimensions. The annual reports of public analysts show that many are examining foods outside the Survey lists now that gas/liquid chromatography, spectroscopy and other highly refined methods of analysis are available to them.

THE question of the advisability of exercising a censorship over literature has been much before the public of late, and probably many librarians have realised how closely the disputed question affects their own profession.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of vocational education for girls, focusing on how curriculum and pedagogy developed to accommodate changing expectations of the role of women in the workplace and the home in mid-twentieth century Australia. As well as describing how pedagogical changes were implemented through curriculum, it examines the way a modern approach to girls’ education was reflected in the built environment of the school site and through its interactions with its changing community.

The paper takes a case study approach, focusing on the example of the J.H. Boyd Domestic College which functioned as a single-sex school for girls from 1932 until its closure in 1985. Oral history testimony, private archives, photographs and government school records provide the material from which an understanding of the school is reconstructed.

This detailed examination of the history of J.H. Boyd Domestic College highlights the highly integrated nature of the school's environment with the surrounding community, which strengthened links between the girls and their community. It also demonstrates how important the school's buildings and facilities were to contemporary ideas about the teaching of girls in a vocational setting.

This is the first history of J.H. Boyd Domestic College to examine the intersections of gendered, classed ideas about pedagogy with ideas about the appropriate built environment for the teaching of domestic science. The contextualized approach sheds new light on domestic science education in Victoria and the unusually high quality of the learning spaces available for girls’ education.

Viewing the last dying embers of 1984, the Orwel‐lian year of Big Brother and some of its not‐so‐far off the mark predictions, the unemployment which one cannot help feeling is more apparent than real, it is hardly surprising that the subject of Poverty or the so‐called Poverty arise. The real poverty of undernourished children, soup kitchens, children suffering at Christmas, hungry children ravenously consuming free school meals has not, even now, returned.

An appeal under the Food and Drugs Acts, reported in the present number of the BRITISH FOOD JOURNAL, is an apt illustration of the old saying, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In commenting upon the case in question, the Pall Mall Gazette says: “The impression among the great unlearned that the watering of the morning's milk is a great joke is ineradicable; and there is also a common opinion among the Justice Shallows of the provincial bench that the grocer who tricks his customers into buying coffee which is 97 per cent. chicory is a clever practitioner, who ought to be allowed to make his way in the world untrammelled by legal obstructions. But the Queen's Bench have rapped the East Ham magistrates over the knuckles for convicting without fining a milkman who was prosecuted by the local authority, and the case has been sent back in order that these easygoing gentlemen may give logical effect to their convictions.”

The information which has hitherto appeared in the daily press as to the evidence laid before the Departmental Committee which is inquiring into the use of preservatives and colouring matters can hardly have afforded pleasant reading to the apologists for the drugging of foods. It is plainly the intention of the Committee to make a thorough investigation of the whole subject, and the main conclusions which, in the result, must bo forced upon unbiassed persons by an investigation of this character will be tolerably obvious to those who have given serious attention to the subject. At a later stage of the inquiry we shall publish a full account of the evidence submitted and of the Committee's proceedings. At present we may observe that the facts which have been brought forward fully confirm the statements made from time to time upon these matters in the BRITISH FOOD JOURNAL, and amply justify the attitude which we have adopted on the whole question. Representatives of various trade interests have given evidence which has served to show the extent to which the practices now being inquired into are followed. Strong medical evidence, as to the dangers which must attach to the promiscuous and unacknowledged drugging of the public by more or less ignorant persons, has been given; and some medical evidence of that apologetic order to which the public have of late become accustomed, and which we, at any rate, regard as particularly feeble, has also been put forward. Much more will no doubt be said, but those who have borne the heat and burden of the day in forcing these matters upon the attention of the Legislature and of the public can view with satisfaction the result already attained. Full and free investigation must produce its educational effect ; and whatever legal machinery may be devised to put some kind of check upon these most dangerous forms of adulteration, the demand of the public will be for undrugged food, and for a guarantee of sufficient authority to ensure that the demand is met.

The President of the Board of Agriculture has introduced in the House of Commons his long‐promised Bill for preventing the sale of butter containing large amounts of water, and the proposed measure appears to have been received with general approval on both sides of the House.

At a meeting of the Barnstaple Rotary Club on November 5th, Mr. Percy Penhale, Borough Veterinary Inspector, read a paper upon bovine tuberculosis. Mr. Penhale said he wished to speak with particular regard to a pure milk supply, which was a vital topic to them all. With consumption so rife as it was among human beings, veterinary surgeons marvelled that “the powers that be” apparently continued to regard the present state of affairs with apathy, and it was high time sweeping measures were adopted. There were various methods of infection, but cohabitation and inhalation were by far the most frequent, and almost always in a cow shippen or other confined space where tubercle bacilli had been voided from the bodies of previous subjects of the disease. In the early stages there were no appreciable symptoms, and the general condition of the animal might afford no information. Following a technical description of the disease, Mr. Penhale passed to its importance on the health of the general public. It did not stretch one's imagination far to see that the dairy herd was likely to be far more affected with tuberculosis than other cattle, as these were more often confined together in buildings. It was estimated by many eminent authorities that at least 33 per cent. of the dairy herd to‐day were tuberculous. In support of that he would say that in 56 herds tested around the Birmingham district 37 per cent. were found to be affected. It then became necessary to show that bovine tuberculosis was transmissible to mankind. This had been completely proved over and over again, but to what degree the general public was in total ignorance. In 1912 Mitchell, working in Edinburgh, discovered that 90 per cent. of cases of tuberculosis in the human being were bovine in origin. Those figures raised considerable criticism in the medical profession, but some time later Beng, working in the same city, confirmed Mitchell's experiences. It might, therefore, be taken as a fact that bovine infection was responsible for the majority of cases of tuberculosis in the human being. And bovine infection was but another name for milk infection. In the early days of life, when resistance to the disease was at its lowest, and cows' milk was the staple article of diet, the child was brought into contact with the constantly‐recurring possibilities of infection. To analyse the methods suggested for our protection, Pasteurization and boiling of milk had been the reiterated cry of many, and it was true that milk heated to 85 degrees centigrade (or 185 degrees Fahrenheit) would destroy all the tubercle bacilli or spores that the milk contained. But scientists were about equally divided. One half said that Pasteurization or boiling destroyed some of the necessary vitamines and salts that raw milk should contain. In any case, such methods should be unnecessary, and to his mind it was merely condoning an evil. Then microscopical examination of milk was very uncertain, and was not the safeguard so many would have them believe. Where could they look for the salvation? He unhesitatingly replied to the tuberculin test—the safest and surest test they were ever likely to know. He would have it applied to every milk‐bearing cow. In his view the milk of re actors should be forthwith condemned, or Pasteurized and used for calves.

THE time is come when the Library Association and the Library Assistants' Association should combine to draw up a scale of reasonable salaries for properly qualified service in libraries for use (a) in advising authorities seeking information upon the point, and (b) as a gauge if they should decide to make a united protest against the low remuneration which authorities sometimes disgrace themselves by offering to librarians.

IN The age newspaper, Dennis Pryor writes: ‘Booksellers remainder them, publishers pulp them, churches and wowsers ban them, dictators burn them, students photocopy them. Marshall Mcluhan wrote them to prove they were finished.’