RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 37, 7 November 1933, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND. GENERAL

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There is a growing suspicion that Marianne is all my eye and Betty Martin after all. •.■ • • News from Detroit reports that the die-makers’ strike is dead. Nothing could be as dead as a die when one takes stock of the situation. •.• . • According to a visitor, New Zealanders’ teeth are the worst in the world. Others have also complained that we are down in the mouth. “In ‘The Dominion’ yesterday, ‘lnquirer,’ Grey town, asked for the name (family) of the King of England before it was chan’ged to Windsor,” writes “Second Inquirer.’’ “Your reply is that it was Guelph. No doubt Guelph was the name until Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, then her name would by rights change to his." * * * The correct family, name of the King of England before it was changed to Windsor appears to have been a matter of considerable controversy. Some experts declared it was Guelph and others said that the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert changed the name to Wettin. Others declared that although Queen Victoria married a man with the name of Wettin there was no legal obligation to take the name. They maintain that Queen Victoria did not change her family name. The matter seems to have escaped the attentions of the Queen herself. Whittaker’s Peerage, after pointing out that there has always been some difference of opinion on the matter, says that the problem was referred to the late Clarenceaux, King of Arms. “The prevailing idea that the nam’e is Guelph he dismisses as absurd,” continues Whittaker’s, “that hiving constituted the Christian name of a medieval Duke of Bavaria whose sister in 1040 married the Marquess of Este, and it is from that couple that the Hanoverian line is descended. Hence d’Este comes nearer to a correct name than the above, while Guelph-d’Este has been supplied by another authority. But the marriage of Queen Victoria to Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and descended from the ancient counts of Wettin, changed the present line to that of Saxe-Coburg, and made Wettin its surname if it possessed one at all.- Bv the definite adoption of the surname Windsor this question has now been settled.” * Just what Gordon Richards’ income will be this year after riding 246 winners only he and the income tax people will ever know, A year or two ago it is known that h,e was paid a retaining fee of £4,000 for the Reason by the Beckhampton stable, plus 10 per cent, of the stakes won by the horses he rode. This contract alone brought him in well over £lO,OOO for a season's racing. As, however, he was at liberty to ride in other races in which his own stables were not represented, his total income was nearer £20,000 than £lO,OOO. If the public likes to see a jockey winning races there are others to whom the Spectacle is not always so inspiring. Certainly Gordon Richards* knack of riding winners is phenomenal, but when he rode five, winners in five races in one race meeting, and 12 consecutive winners in three days the bookmakers began to look a little glum. This feat, which has never been equalled in the annals of racing, caused the bookmakers to call the race meetings concerned Black Wednesday, and Blacker Thursday. »• • • As it has been estimated that during the last 100 years no less a sum than £3:000,000,000 has been lost and won on the turf, it becomes evident that horse racing at least keeps money circulating. But these figures are only a part of the staggering totals contributed by racing to the statistics of mankind. The fact is that if the money won and lost on the turf were converted into golden sovereigns it would, if placed on a gigantic scales, with rhe 60,000 horses involved on the other pan, actually outweigh the horses themselves. There is not much chance of this unusual type of weighing-in ever being put to practical test for the simple reason that it would require 250,000 men to stack up the gold. The fact is that this huge sum that has been won on the turf is sufficient to pave with gold a race track 25 miles long and 120 feet wide. A race track of that nature should prove a great attraction. After all, the money "blown” on horse racing in the last 100 years, is not so utterly lost as the comparable sum blown in the last war in three years. If specimens of all the known insects of the world require a building six floors in height and 140 feet :n length to accommodate them, as has been pointed out in the news, just what sized city would be required to house specimens of all the insects of the world, known and unknown. The fact is that our knowledge of tire insect world is decidedly scanty despite the fact that painstaking scientists have enumerated and indexed no fewer than 500.000 species. Large as is this total it is strongly suspected that there are as many insects again that have never yet been discovered. Compared with man, insects have been on this world far longer—so.ooo,ooo years as against a mere 500.000 years. Ip that time it is understandable that insects bare had time to produce an almost unlimited series of types. Insects saw the rise of plants, the fall of reptiles, the beginning of man. and so far as can be seen they may see the end of him. too. More enduring than the landscape itself. more fertile than any known form of life except microbes, more ravenous than the birds, a plague of insects may yet sweep all other forms of life from the world. The note of assertion with which the last paragraph ended possibly requires a little amplification if we are to see matters in the insect world in their true perspective. But for a ceaseless fight on the insect front, hut for the fact that man makes war on insects, it has been estimated that the world at this very moment would be unable to cope with its present human population. Already insects have killed the cotton trade in Mexico. The late Professor Lefroy, a well-known authority oh insects, even went so far as to prophecy that in 20 years’ time not a single bale of cotton would come out of America. That is what the boll weevil is trying to do to cotton. The blow-fly and the buffalo fly. if not severely kept in cheek, would do for the meat industry what the boll weevil is trying to do in North, America But possibly the greatest single enemy of man is the locust. Since the day- of the Pharaohs It has beaten num. As much money has been spent and lost, since civilisation started, thanks to locusts as was spent in the whole of the wars of the last 100 years. Yet locusts are as numerous as ever.