262 



the bees seem very ready to work the cocoanuts. Coffee blos- 

 soms are said to yield food for the bees very freely. 



Reviewing a handbook on education, by H. Osmond Xewland, 

 founder of the British West African Association and the Eg}-pt- 

 ian Association, Tropical Life bewails the kind of education the 

 parents of Greater London are forced to accept under pains of 

 fines and imprisonment if they do not make the children undergo 

 it. For all but perhaps 50 per cent of the children, the magazine 

 sets forth, the existing system tends to force them "to misery 

 and want." What it says further in the following quotation is 

 worthy of study in Hawaii, where, happily, some people and the 

 legislature have already taken up the central idea presented : 

 ''Our present system encourages, if it does not actually force, 

 countrymen and townsmen alike to flock into the cities, whereas 

 what this empire is crying out and starving for is decentraliza- 

 tion, is the need of not only driving our surplus population out 

 of the cities, but also out of the country, to go elsewhere to earn 

 their living and increase the trade of this country. The onl}' 

 compulsion we believe in is compulsion to work. It is the only 

 thing the law does not insist upon. It compels you to be edu- 

 cated in a way that, with at least 50 per cent of very poor, leads 

 to nowhere ; it punishes you if you do not insure ; if you do not 

 call in the doctor when ill ; if you prefer to starve than to live on 

 charity ; but to train you to be of a real help to your country and 

 to yourself by teaching you agricultural industries, and forcing 

 those who cannot earn the much discussed minimum w^age in the 

 large towns and cities, which many are not worthy of, to go back 

 to the land and earn what they can, and all they are worthy of, 

 has not entered into the minds of our educational experts, who 

 teach you what they want you to learn, not what you, the student, 

 require to know." 



A report of the proceedings of the W'est Indian Agricultural 

 Conference, 1912, continued in No. 3, \^ol. XII, of the West 

 Indian liulletin, contains some papers on sugar which should be 

 of much interest to Hawaiian planters. 



"Insect Pests of the Lesser Antilles," by H. A. Ballou, M. Sc, 

 an entomologist on the staff of the West Indies department of 

 Agriculture, has been received. It is a pamphlet of 210 pages, 

 and is copiously illustrated. "The Mediterranean fruit fly," the 

 work says, "is perhaps the most widely distriljutod of the fruit 

 flies." 



