Women in the News

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 160, 9 July 1938, Page 15

Women in the News

NEW ZEALANDER’S POST. A member of the staff of the New Zealand Department of Agriculture, Miss Ethelwyn M. Mason, of Tauranga, has been appointed technical assistant to Dr. Francis C. Kelly, the new director of the lodine Educational Bureau, recently formed by tho Nitrate Corporation of Chile, Limited, writes a correspondent. The new bureau will collect all available scientific informaton which has been developed in respect of iodine since 1813, when the element was discovered by tho French chemist, Bernard Courtois. This information will be placed at the disposal of the medical profession and scientific agricultural circles, as well as commercial interests including feeding stuffs manufacturers and livestock breeders. In addition, tho bureau will collaborate with scientific institutions iu experimental research to extend the knowledge of iodine, with special reference to its uso in human and animal nutrition. Miss Mason holds the degree of Master of Science from the University of New Zealand. Infant prodigies are not exactly rare, :-ut there is something truly miraculous j iu the 400 oils, water-colours and drawings executed by Roswitha Bitterlich between the ages of three and 17 and exhibited at the New Burlington Galleries, states an overseas writer. The range of her imagination and the skill of her hand stamp her as the most amazing art progidy of post-war years. The young artist was born in 1920 on the shore of Lake Constance, and has lived at Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, since 1928. At the age of three she drew herself between two guardian angels, and at 13 she tackled a large and most successful Gothically-lurid canvas of “The Banquet of Death,’* in which Famine, Plague, War and Greed are fellow guests with the Horseman, the! Spendthrift, the Queen and the Knave. ■ Roswitha is still at senool, and prepar- j ing for matriculation and is a thoroughly unspoilt, healthy and pretty girl in spite of her amazing success in the' world of art. j

Mrs Mary Elizabeth Cox, of Onehunga, for fifty years a resident of Auckland, yesterday celebrated her 95th , birthday. She is an amateur painter in oils, her teacher being the father of the famous Ilcrtcomer. Her last three pictures were painted 18 months ago. ]