RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 226, 21 June 1935, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Kickshaws.)

Sidelights on Current Events

(By

Anyway, those early land deals emphasise what a lot has been learned since then. ♦ 4 * New Zealand, it is said, is on a sound road. Any more corners? « • ♦ * We take it that Trotsky uses those disguises in case he might be mistaken for someone else. « * * To-day’s children’s story"A little boy, chastised for bad language, was ordered to write the Lord’s Prayer twelve times,” says “T.E.” "He wrote the first two words and then • said, ‘Please, how do you spell ‘Charten’?” <: * * That picture in “The Dominion” yesterday of a real live dragon, complete with everything a dragon ought to have, except a habit of spitting lire, at least shows that Nature has a way of making fairy tales come true. It is little more than a century since tlie dodo, the solitaire, the great auk and tlie moa, disappeared for ever. Bur it is hundreds of thousands of years ago since some of the early creatures of the world disappeared. Yet there are strange tales right down to recent times concerning them. In the unexplored swamps of Madagascar, for instance, the natives declare that there lives to this day a huge semi-aquatie beast that no white man has ever seen. They call the monster a “tratratra.” We may yet see one of these beasts in the zoo. From Liberia come tales of a curious crocodile beast called a “linguin.” It has a lizard-like body with a very long neck. Several people have tried to shoot it, but so far all we have are travellers’ tales. But that does not mean that no. “lingnins” exist. If only the camera had been invented, perhaps some press photographer would have snapped St. George having a go at his famous dragon, and settled that fairy tale once and for all. * One is apt to laugh at tales of strange animals because, for some reason, mankind is always sceptical about things it has never seen. .Even now there is a tendency to dismiss the Loeb Ness monster as a figure of the imagination of residents out for a little publicity. Nevertheless, there have been tales of monsters from lakes in many parts of the world. Marco Polo, moreover, reported, 600 years ago, tlie existence of a strange ape which, for want of a name, is known as the orang pendek. No specimen has ever been captured or killed for the last 600 years. But there are still tales of the existence of the animal. Not long ago an expedition that set out to lay this travellers’ yarn of six centuries standing returned with a skin and skeleton of a curious ape that caused uo little stir in the scientific world. Even the river Gauges is said to harbour strange longnecked aquatic animals that have only been seen b.v natives, and on one occasion by a British officer waiting for a tiger. Unfortunately, the officer did not realise that he had seen an unknown species, and did not shoot. Perhaps one day our zoos will have a “Lost World” corner in them as a matter of course.

The Ker. Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa approached farming from a novel angle, when he said that if you have too many cows, you can’t rear so niany boys to the acre. Can it be that dairy and sheep farming is really a huge luxury which the world could well do without'; There are only two sources of food supply for us—the meat of animals or the products of the plant world. We cannot convert inorganic matter into organic matter. We have not the power to create living matter out o£ stones. Our very existence depends upon a source of food supply that has alreadylived. We can eat other animals because they consist of living matter. We cannot eat earth. But plants can. They have the power to kindle the spark of life in inorganic chemicals. That sort of stuff serves as food for us. Once the plant world has dealt with the basic chemicals of the earth and air. and converted them into living matter, we can have our daily bread. It may be first hand from the vegetable world, or second band from the animal world. The latter would, indeed, appear to be an indirect way of existing, and for that reason a luxury. « * * The problem of food supplies is. however, rather more complicated than the consideration of the number of boys to the acre or cows. The boys may well be wanted where they cannot be put out to feed, so to speak. If we scattered our boys and our men around the paddocks, the labour problem would become difficult. Our cities would have to disappear. Transport charges for distributing the essentials of life would become involved. The tendency is. and always has been, to concentrate population in a number of places and to keep the sources of food supply scattered. The fact remains, nevertheless, that somewhere in the civilised world there must be the necessary .15 acres to supply each one of us with the necessaries of life. As a matter of fact, if we include the whole world population, it requires • very much more land than that to provide food for tin* ’2OOO million people; about 100 acres for each of us. The civilised world. therefore, has the choice of collecting us into communities and sending us our food from our hundred acres or placing each of us on our hundred acres and leaving ns to do our best. The latter ms tliod was in vogue 4000 years ago * ❖ * Food is essential to the existence of a community, but what is even more essential to progress in a community is an efficient method of producing and supplying the food. The tendency, therefore, has been to make more blades of grass grow where less grew before Thanks to the discovery of cheap fertilisers and the fixation of nitrogen from the air, efficient food production has been able to more than cope with tile ever growing populations. The one weak part of the link has been distribution. It costs more to distribute our daily bread than to bake it. One cure for this is for each community to produce its own food as efficiently as possible. The world has recently been experimenting in this line. It is indeed this that has caused those meat conferences in England. It is. moreover. this problem that has caused farmers in some parts of the world to start ploughing under glass. In parts of England at this moment it is possible to see the plough at work inside huge greenhouses. More food. quicker grown and independent of the weather is the cause of this curious change in farming methods in colder climates. Something like £4O million Is being spent on this in England, in an effort to put at least 10,000 acres of farm land tinder glass to speed up food supplies.