pictures. TOP: ‘at Charlie she country. AN effort to promote an understanding of higher j, sation in the Soviet Union, hy, C2nadian-Soviet Friend- he Society in Vancouver will Pan the full length film, i of Culture, in Pender bep penam, Friday, Novem- Vit 3, 8 p.m. This film deals in the building and open- Unive the Lomonosov State €rsity in Moscow. tht peice of Culture offers an dey. Sting comparison in the Taj oPment of education as dg °C the USSR and Cana- rhe day is fast approaching t ®n every young person in title “ae Union will be en- i a college education the aN be able to get it for tm SKing. Only lack of ac- Vent Odation and teachers pre- is how. ne sums are being spent bes Se the gap in school build- y trained staff, text books Rs Scientific equipment. More “Open 900 new schools were lie ed in the Russian Repub- Th ne this year. Coy, € new university in Mos- Will cover 790 acres. More sone LA 8 i granddaughter oi Chief than 18,000 students will be grouped in 12 faculties. Student enrolment in Soviet higher institutes of learning is expected to increase by 200 percent*in the next five years as compared with an expected increase in Canada of ninety and Mrs. Efforts of Native Indians in this province to preserve their crafts are illustrated by these Maysie Harris, With some of the baskets made by the Native Indians on Seabird Island in the Fraser Valley, “Sine cedar root and cherry bark and following the traditional designs. works on one of the Indian sweat2rs Cowichan Indians have made famous across Alfred Hope is shown BOTTOM: Mrs. New film depicts development of higher education in USSR percent in the next ten years. If you want to get an idea of how they are tackling the job in the Soviet Union, by all means see this film. Maybe it will give you some ideas as to how the problem should be tackled in this country. BOOKS eedham continues aR A i BAT SSE is study of China wr did China fail to de- velop modern systematic science? Has China contrib- uted anything to modern scien- tific theory or has it been only a pupil of Europe? These are among the ques- tions put by Dr. Joseph Need- ham in the second volume of his masterly Science and Civil- isation in China (Cambridge University Press). To answer them he covers the whole range of Chinese philosophers from Confucius and the Taoists to those of the 18th century, for his subject in this volume is Chinese phil- osophy and its relation to the development of scientific thought. The Taoists, often medicine men or magicians’ turned philosophers, were China’s first scientists or proto-scien- tists, and Dr. Needham does much to show the range of their thought and extent of their knowledge. With a wealth of research and an immense fund of know- ledge, he sets out the various views of the ancient schools of philosophy, and it is fascinat- ing to read of their growth into the more developed ma- terialist and organic philoso- phies of the 11th-13th cen- turies and later. Into this discussion Dr. Need- ham throws points of trans- lation and darting comparisons with Greek, Latin, medieval and modern European think- ers, plus a discussion on Budd- hism and a few other matters. tt x tt In his first and introduc- tory volume he had some ex- citing things to say about cul- ture contacts between China and Europe, and Europe’s heavy debt to China for a whole. range of highly civilised inventions, from the wheel- barrow to the printing press. In that volume he showed how in European Middle Ages the Arabs had been great transmitters of Chinese inven- tions and techniques to Europe but they had not transmitted Chinese scientific thought. * Scroll describes Abraham's wife A’, English version of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls is to be published shortly, it is an- nounced in London by ex- Major-General Dr. Y. Yadin, one of Israel’s most famous archaeologists. He disclosed that after two years work he and a colleague have successfully deciphered the seventh scroll which con- sists of stories written in the first person about Abraham, Noah and Enoch. Dr. Yadin describes the ‘re- sults of his work as “a start- ing point for fresh study on many vital questions for schol- ars.” The scroll was the only one of those discovered by Bedouin Arabs to be written in Ara- maic. It contains in greater detail many of the _ stories which are included in the Bible. Dr. Yadin said there was a “unique description” of the beauty of Sarai — Abraham’s wife — and of the afflictions which overtook Pharaoh after he had taken her away from Abraham. A part of the description reads: “.. fine is the hair of her head. How fair indeed are her eyes and how pleasing her nose and all the radiance of her faces ss =. “How beautiful her breast, and how lovely all her white- ness. Her arms goodly to look . upon, and her hands how per- fect. It is particularly interesting to find such-an intimate de- scription of a woman’s beauty in the scroll which had been found in what was once the library of thé Dead Sea Sect, reputed to be celibates, Dr. Yadin says. Only five pages of the orig- inal 22 pages — which Dr. Yadin believes were written in the latter half of the Third Century B.C: — have~-so far been deciphered. “About eight pages are lost forever,” he reports. Using infra-red photography, he and Dr. N. Avigad are now trying to establish’ the content of the other pages. But now he whether Chinese scientific thought might not have played a role in developing modern Euro- pean scientific philosophy. asks His argument very briefly is this — that in ancient China the Taoist-thinkers, whose views were later developed by thinkers called neo-Con- fucian, put forward an “or- ganic view” of nature. In Europe; by contrast, most of the scientists and phiso- phers of the 17th century de- veloped mechanistic views. But these mechanist views are now shown to be inade- quate to the understanding of the world and have been re- placed in philosophies such as Marxism and those of White- head and Morgan, by “a phil- osophy of organism” which is materialist and also dialectical and taking account of living things. Did Chinese thinkers con- tribute to these modern scien- tific philosophies? Dr. Needham thinks that they did, because the late 17th century German philosiener Leibniz, who started this mod- ern development in Europea philosophy, was a student of Chinese thought. How many of the ideas of Leibniz were taken from China is not yet know, Ms ot Ad writes Dr. Needham, “perhaps the theoretical foundations of the most modern ’European’ natural science owe more” to Chinese thinkers “than the world has yet realised.” Dr.. Needham, however, has no doubt that it was the Euro- pean scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Brunos, Galileos, Newtons and others who really put modern: science on its feet and he asks why this was so. In the main, he holds, it was the bureaucratic feudal sys- tem which choked science in China. But there were also intel- lectual weaknesses — the sep- aration between nature ob- servers like the Taoists’ and other rational thinkers; the concentration on human be- havior to the exclusion of the rest of nature; and the failure to develop a conception of laws of nature. It is not an easy reading, especially on the mumbo- Jumbo of the Book of Changes, and one wonders if Dr. Need- ham does not press a point too far or rely on his interpretation than on what a Chinese thinker actually said or wrote. But he brings great mass of views and strikes hard against that European conceit which still dominates so ‘many who think (and more together a write) that in Europe alone was any worthwhile science done or worthwhile views ex- pressed. ARTHUR CLEGG NOVEMBER 23, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 13