TIMELY TOPICS

Northern Advocate, 7 November 1932, Page 4

TIMELY TOPICS

EMPIRE’S BEEF TRADE. Affording to a statement issued by tii o Empire Marketing Bbard, tlio principal features of Empire trade iu beef are the very large imports into ihe United Kingdom, mainly in recent years,* of chilled beef and the much smaller exports from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, almost entirely of frozen beef. It, has been found within the last, year or two that the lower -prices for beef have resulted in an even wider disparity between the Argentine chilled beef and the Australian frozen article. In July, 1931, when the lowest figures were reached, 1 lie average price in four largo English cities was 4Jd per lb for Argentine first quality, and only 2 15-lfid for the corresponding Australian grade. Even last Do ember, when Argentine was again at 43d, the Australian figures was only fractionally higher than its previous lowest point, at 3 1-lfid. The disparity between these prices could be reduced very considerably if not entirely removed, by the adoption of chilling. Mr Oullett, in his speech on the Ottawa agreement, pointed out that at present Australia and New Zealand supplied only 5-i per cent, of the total consumption of beef in England, and 13 per cent of the total beef imports. * * * •* ANCIENT MINING IN RHODESIA. Professor Raymond A. Dart, Professor of Anatomy and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University of (he Witwatersrand. has completed the manuscript of a work on ancient mining in Rhodesia. It will be remembered that both Df. Randall MaeIver and Miss Caton Thompson, the only trained archaeologists who have examined the great Zimbabwe, state that those particular ruins are of Bantu origin. Miss Caton Thompson gives their earliest date at the Bth century A.D. Professor Randall Maclver put the ruins of the mines of Rhodesia at about A.D. 1100 the period of the Arab Magodoxo. Professor Dart contends that Rhodesia was being mined 3000 years before that. The great Zimbabwe ruins are not necessarily the most ancient of the ruins and are not adjacent to any old mine. Professor Dart maintains that recent discoveries afford definite evidence that the inhabitants of ancient Rhodesia, while in a pure stone-age and while using stone implements of ancient paleolithic and very primitive neolithic tool types, were mining for manganese. That must have been 3000 ‘to -1000 B.C. These Rhodesian miners were under the supervision of strangers belonging to one of the ancient contemporary civilisations. The supervisors were probably from Egypt or Mesopotamia, or were traders with Egypt. Professor Dart also argues that Rhodesian manganese was probably used by the Egyptians to obtain colours for glass, the purple being the Royal colour of the Egypt of the Pyramids: that the land of ‘Punt” of the Bible was probably the name for an unknown and mysterious Southern Africa; and that there is evidence that the nickeliferous bronze in the, Babylonian gates of Shalmaneser and the Egyptian statue of Pepi the First was similar to the bronze smelted near the ancient Rooiberg workings in the Transvaal.