1937-04-22 — Page 11

THE CHINA MAIL, APRIL 22, 1937.

What FIVE BABIES DID

DID TO

TO A TOWN!

SHORT time ago, with the pumps of the filling station across the life of their guardian and se-

A winter-long snow still white the street.

on the pine woods, I got off the northbound Canadian train at Cal- lander, Ontario, and for a moment had the panicky feeling of a travel- ler who has alighted at the wrong station.

They were bright red, and each bare the gilded name of a quintu- plet.

him.

-And while all business contracts

He is the only man on whom the cond father, Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe five little girls can depend all of is the go-between When I first visited him in the the time. He

with the Government and the ever- early days of the quintuplets his

changing politicians în all matters twenty-five years of obscure and

pertaining to the children's welfare. sometimes unrewarded toil in the Those pumps sold 38,000 gallons wilderness weighed heavily upon of gas last summer. The best that On my last visit, nearly three pumps had ever sold in Callander

before the arrival of the babies was. He was very tired. He told me years before, when the quintuplets about 2,000 gallons a year.

that he was getting old although with the quins are made at Toronto through the commissioner of pub- were tiny, swaddled side by side in

he was only fifty.

lic welfare, it is Dr. Dafoe who And then the miracle happened. sees that the contracts are execut-

ed without harm to the children. These five elves opened the door of a new world to their new

Dr. Dafoe accompanies every He is in better health to-day than he stranger who enters the nursery. has been for years. Five little baby And he turns down thousands of girls have given life a meaning.

a big basket near Dionne's wood Everything, indeed, has changed stove, there was no railroad station in Callander. Three years of the in Callander. An old wooden quintuplets have been more profit- coach with

smoke-stack able to a greater number of people a tin through the roof served the purpose than a gold rush ever was.. luxuriously for that remote and

Those five little Dionnes have de- lonely town.

veloped into a super chamber of But now I found myself staring commerce. at a new brick station, with

They have arched the highways ticket window, a ruddy fire and a with signs of welcome, and complet- wood-panelled waiting-room.

a

Just then a man with creaking boots came toiling down the plat- form behind a large baggage truck on sled-runners, laden with boxes and mailbags.

:

I could see the stencilled name of A. R. Dafoe on all of them:

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Oh, yes.

I was at the right place -the most famous little town on earth to-day, except Bethlehem. The quintuplets, like five little brownies working in the night, had built

a new railroad station.

I glanced around for an hotel. That building across the new rock road looked strangely familiar. Yes, it was the old hotel made new shining with white paint, glass a- glitter, with a remodelled lobby, I discovered, full of over-stuffed furni- ture.

I told the hotel clerk it was 2 pleasure and a surprise to find him there; that on my last visit I had been obliged to tap a rusty little

I

*

man.

are

dollars a year which wealthy fami- lies offer for a special session with the children and the privilege of handling them.

The quintuplets are wealthy. Now, ed great gaps in long-unfinished almost three years old, they

It is only on his orders that the roads.

worth somewhere in the neighbour quints are shown even in the play- They have built innumerable cot- hood of £115,000.

yard. tages from North Bay to Toronto, and have sold thousands of dollars'

But they pay every penny worth of goods in a region of in- their upkeep... active sawmills and stagnant trade. To Callander-the New York ticket agent asked me how to spell

They own the house wh they live in.

The quintuplets are always in dan `ger of too much love, They have narrowly escaped being the victims

it a little less than three years ago Their last motion picture contract, of greed. But through civil suits, --they brought more than 500,000 for three stories, brought them exploitation, rows in the nursery tourists last summer, and this sum- £62,000. Their first picture, "The and rows outside the nursery, mer there is every indication that Country Doctor," brought they will attract double the number. £12,000.

Experts believe that the quints have already brought more than £2,500,000 worth of business to Ontario.

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them through political storms and three exciting years of fame, fortune and world acclaim, the little girls have The rest of the money has come had through their lives the from the sale of photographs ad- broken thread of the good doctor's vertisements, patent rights on their love and solicitude. names and from gifts.

But the greatest change wrought Dr. Dafoe is now world-famous by the Dionne girls has been in he has tremendous responsibilities,

un-

If they have been the elves who changed his life, he has been the kindly heart who has saved theirs.

Listening-in To FOOD

bell many times stamp, my feet, Pood builds up our bodies

and finally yell.

COMPETITION STARTS

"%

ex-

ROBLEMS as to the way our "The amount of arsenic required as tasteless as distilled water—and

has advanced by a little more than it is nearly as pure. bones teeth, flesh-are in process 10 per cent. in each generation bred

Many industrial uses, it is of solution.

from survivors.”

pected, will be found for the new The recently-discovered artificial The experiment should show the discovery.

us rate of action of selection-how in- radio-active elements are being

Other recent synthetic resin pro- ed. These "broadcast" their pre- dividuals survive by adapting them- sence. Instruments can detect selves to changing environment and ducts are a transparent plastic re- minute quantities, even in chemical handing on the capacity for adapta- sin, which can be used in place of

glass lenses, and a synthetic wool. He said that people were drop-combination in living bodies, dur- tion to their descendants. ping in at all hours now-whole ing the substances brief active life families of them.

of a few hours.

There were only four little musty rooms in the hotel then, and they were all leaking like packing cases in a downpour of rain.

It is hoped that the experiments will give a clue to the rate at which The snowplough kept open the Professor August Krogh, of Co- selection acts in man. newly completed road from Toronto,penhagen, is injecting radio-ele-

225 miles south.

ments into rats.

He discovered that radio-phos-

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Soon there would be stiff "com- petition. A new resort and hotel phorus atoms, ́ which turned up VERSATILE RESINS were going up not far away on the shortly after injection in the den- shore of Lake Nipissing.

tine of the teeth, were in constant exchange with salts in solution in

However, there would be enough business for all, what with 1,000,000 visitors expected this summer.

the blood.

Further experiments may show that many "atoms composing our

bodies are constantly changing

places in this way without the in- Later that morning I saw Grand-tervention of blood vessels. pa. Olivier Dionne standing in the snow in front of Ken Morrison's now flourishing general store, his

hands in the pockets of his plaid ARSENIC FOR SHRIMPS jacket, his little grey eyes almost hidden by the vizor of his lumber- jack cap.

He stood alone, because most of Callander's 200 unemployed men are at work-serving the brownies

By dosing shrimps with arsenic, research workers at University Col- lege, London, are trying to settle disputed points about evolution.

Yet another application has been found for synthetic resins that mar- vellous range of substances which, existing a few years ago only in the laboratory, now have many thousands of uses and form the basis of many industries.

Bakelite is the best known.

UNDESIRABLE ALIEN

Search for methods of protecting the British gourmet's asparagus from an undesirable alien is being undertaken by Ministry of Agricul- ture plant pathologists, working un- der Dr. J. C. F. Fryer, at Harpen- den.

The alien is the asparagus fly, which turned up in private gardens in Hertfordshire last year.

It is gradually spreading west- ward from its native Central and Southern Europe, became a serious

was

The discovery has been made in pest in the Seine Valley at the be- the Water Pollution Chemical Re- ginning of the century and search Laboratory at Rothamsted reported in Holland in 1931, that two synthetic resins can be used for v water softening and puri- fication.

One resin, made of a special tan- nin and formalin, removes the me-

It lays its eggs in asparagus shoots and the little white grubs tunnel along the stem, spoiling the asparagus.

The Continental plans. for destroy- asparagus

Professor R. A. Fisher told me: tallic parts of the salts in the water. ing this pest-setting the building and mending roads, build-"Each new brood produced by our. Another, made from formalin and between higher crops or fooling the ing new shops and houses, changing shrimps is distributed into six a coal tar product, removes the acids fly by planting gum-coated sticks

painted to look like asparagus- tyres for motorists.

strengths of arsenic solution. We which remain.

each

When I stared with him in the general record how

I tasted water passed not applicable under · usual direction of the five new gasoline strength.

through these two resins I found it ditions.

many die

-are

con-