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THE blueprint, vital communication link between designer, engineer and manufacturer, is currently undergoing a radical change in its traditional format at the Boeing Airplane Company in the United States.

The Commision for Health Improvement report on Rowan ward made for disturbing reading. But until recently the building where the abuse documented in the report took place had a proud history, described in this article.

IN LESS than sixteen years time—on June 30 1997 to be precise—the lease on Kowloon beyond Boundary Street, and on the New Territories, will, according to British Law, expire. Naturally Hong Kong is concerned as the Peking Lease nears its end. Writing in the Daily telegraph on September 28 1981 Graham Earnshaw commented that China ‘obviously wants to keep Hong Kong as it is for at least the immediate future because of its immense economic value, and that is the main thread of hope that Hong Kong people keep returning to when discussing the future’. Kevin Rafferty concluded a lead article ‘The first city in Asia’ in the Financial times special supplement on Hong Kong (June 15 1981)—‘China and Hong Kong are two different worlds and it will take a lot of effort and patience to bring them together’. David Bonavia writing in the Times on October 3 1981 sees in China's recent ‘seemingly generous offer to Taiwan of easy terms for a political reunion’, ‘the true way to a possible solution for the eventual re‐absorption of Hong Kong into the People's Republic’.

The terms are not synonymous; their differences are mainly of function and areas of administration. Community Health is used in national health service law; environmental health to describe the residuum of health functions remaining with local authorities after the first NHS/Local Government reorganization of 1974. Previously, they were all embraced in the term public health, known for a century or more, with little attention to divisions and in the field of administration, all local authority between county and district councils. In the dichotomy created by the reorganization, the personal health services, including the ambulance service, may have dove‐tailed into the national health service, but for the remaining functions, there was a situation of unreality, which has persisted. It is difficult to know where community health and environmental health begin and end. From the outside, the unreality may be more apparent than real. The Royal Commission on the NHS in their Report of last year state that leaving environmental health services with local authorities “does not seem to have caused any problems”—and this, despite the disparity in status of the area health authority and the bottom tier, local councils.

THE speech made by Lord Rosebery at the opening of the new Mitchell Library at Glasgow on October 16th has provoked a great deal of interest in the question whether books can ever really be considered “dead.” Lord Rosebery, in endeavouring to avoid the Scylla of platitude, foundered on the Charybdis of exaggeration. “I know,” he said, “I ought to feel elated at the fact that there is this number of books compressed within these walls, and that a number of people will take advantage of them and read them. I ought to, but I do not, I feel an intense depression at this enormous mass of books, this cemetery of books, because after all most of them are dead. I should like to ask Mr. Barrett in all his experience how many really living books there are in all the Mitchell Library? How many time‐proof books—I should rather call them weather‐proof books—are there in all the Mitchell Library? You have told me it has 180,000 books. This morning I asked him if there were not 100,000 that nobody ever asked for, and he declined diplomatically to reply, but if it be true and the percentage of living books be exceedingly small—and I am afraid we must all agree that it is very small, we cannot test the life of a book until after two or three generations have passed—if the number of living books is exceedingly small in proportion to the whole, what a huge cemetery of dead books or books half alive is represented by a great library like this. Of course, some of them are absolutely dead books that no human being out of a madhouse would ask for. Some are semi‐living, some strayed reveller or wandering student may ask for them at some heedless or too curious a moment. The depressing thought to me in entering a great library of that kind is that, in the main, most of the books are dead. Their barren backs, as it were, appeal for someone to come and take down and rescue them from the passive collection of dust and neglect into which most of them have deservedly fallen … Just think what a great mass of disappointment, what a mass of wrecked hopes and lives is represented by a Public Library. Here you have folios which our generation cannot handle, novels as vapid as soda‐water which has been open for a week, bales of sermons which have given satisfaction to no one but their authors, collections of political speeches even more evanescent than the sermons, bales of forgotten science, superseded history, biographies of people that nobody cares about—all these are the staple of the Public Library.”

[In view of the approaching Conference of the Library Association at Perth, the following note on the Leighton Library may not be inopportune. Dunblane is within an hour's railway journey from Perth and has a magnificent cathedral, founded in the twelfth century, which is well worthy of a visit.]