POINTS FROM LETTERS
THE VATERSAY.'
Could any of your readers inform me about a vessel which was wrecked off the West Coast of Scotland, named the 'Vatersay.' ? This happened about 1852, and there was a deplorable loss of life. I understand this was an emigrant ship and I am anxious to get partieulars.—M. MACLEOD, 14 Partick Street, Glasgow.
RURAL CONSTITUENCIES IN INDIA.
Mr. Yeats-Brown in his article on " The Changing East," in your issue of October 18th, quotes Sir Francis Younghusband as saying of constituencies in India :—" Rural constituencies are nowhere less than 8,000 square miles in area." This is quite inaccurate so far as at least one province—the United Provinces—is concerned. In this province the average area of all non-Mohammedan rural constituencies is just over 2,000 square miles and of Mohammedan rural constituencies rather more than double that area. Out of the seventy-seven rural constituencies in the province only two—both Moham- medan constituencies—have an area exceeding 8,000 square miles.—Tatrrn, Lueknow.
MorimneriArr.
like every one of your readers, must have been inspired by your article on " Gala Britain and a Better World," in the admirable Christmas Number of the Spectator, but there seems to be one omission which I should like to supply, if I may, in the list of reforms so sorely needed in our midst. You mention health but fail to mention mothercraft, without which we shall continue to bring up C3 children. The Mothercraft Training Society, primarily an educational body, is doing pioneer service for a subject which should long ago have found a place in the curriculum of every girl to these islands. Miss Liddiard, the matron of the Mother. Haft Training Society, Cromwell House, Highgate, N.8, will, I know, be glad to receive visitors any Wednesday or to answer questions addressed to her by post. —Wnsivanin WRENCH, Overseas House, Princes Street, Edinburgh.
JOHN NEWTON.
Will you, please, put in your correspondence columns that I should be thankful if one of your readers would send me a copy of John Newton's lines beginning " I asked the Lord that I might grow" ? I cannot get access to a book containing them.—J. GRANGE RADFORD, Wesleyan Methodist Church, 25, Ranmoor Crescent, Sheffield.
KILLING POULTRY.
Mainly because of your footnote to a letter on page 498, issue October 11th, 1930, and because I believe the Spectator is in sympathy with these humane principles, I am enclosing a booklet. These booklets are distributed without cost to anyone who will distribute them without waste.—WALTER CECIL Cox, Secretary, Society for the Abatement of Unneces- sary Violence' in Slaughtering Domestic Food Animals, Denver, Colo., U.S.A.
[A Painless Poultry Killing Method is a pamphlet describing the apparatus by which hens are anaesthetized by centrifugal force, and then killed by a sharp hardened drill pressed into the brain of the bird whilst it is revolving at high speed, causing instant death. The bird is placed in an inverted funnel-shaped metal holder, and is rotated so that the impulses of sensation along the nerve tracks are stilled, for the centrifugal force acting on the blood stream causes hyperaemia of the brain. The lever is then released which sends the drill into the bird's brain. " It is a cowardly traducing of affec- tionate birds," says the author, " to attempt to argue that poultry slaughtering as at present conducted does not bear the stigma of cruelty, and is not barbarous torture, itis a plain grotesque defiance of facts ; cutting into the living pulsating tissues with a hand- operated knife, no matter how adroitly done, simply cannot be accomplished without some degree of torture, and testa show that a swift sharp amputation of the bird's head leaves the severed brain for, occasionally, from the fraction of a minute to two minutes with the most violent sensations of excruciating agony. For the fraction of a minute the head is still alive and functioning, and if any well- calculated fiendish torture can be compressed into that fraction of a minute of the bird's life, it is concentrated in this final crucifixion of its martyred life."—En. Spectator.]
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