Page 6 Advertisements Column 3

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16965, 29 March 1917, Page 6

— Whether or not Rider Haggard's portrait of Allan Quatermain was or was not intended to represent Frederick Courteney Selous, it is no unfair likeness of the mighty hunter who has just lost his life for his country in East Africa (says a writer in the Daily Telegraph). Of the hair breadth escapes he had during his .chase of big game a hundred instances might bo quoted. But the deep scar in the middle of his right_ cheek which he bore to the end of hie life was caused by an accident such as modern hunters could not experience. He had in his early days a 4-bor< elephant rifle—a- terrific weapon at both ends, even when properly charged—and at a_ desperate crisis this £un was given to him by his native servant doublv charged He discharged it, wae blown "head over heels tor yards, and escaped' with a lifelong scar, a cruelly-maimed shoulder, and a terrific shock that a moment later he had to master to save his life a second time. But, mighty hunter though lie was, no one was more strenuously opposed than Selous himself to careless, indiscriminate, and wasteful slaughter. It was characteristic of him that his only contribution to a handbook for frontiersmen should have been not on game destruction, but on game preservation—an appeal to them to "preservo all the species of beautiful wild creatures which exist in the world to-day" from threatened speedy extermination. An American mining engineer has arrived in Englmd with an invention for using nitrogen as an enprgy-producer in place of coal, at a fraction of the cost. Ho is offer ing it in the first place to the British Government. In an interview with .1 representative of the Observer, he nointed out that there are in the atmosphere nearly 4000 billion tons of nitrogen available for use an the new power, and. unlike the use of hydro-carbon fuels, which arc destroyed, his method of using nitro-power converts the fuel back into ite elemental state. "It can be used," he said. '' for every purpose for which coal and rrude oil are now used, even to smelting. With the apparatus I have invented one ton of nitroenergy js equivalent to 1300 tons of coal, nnd it is safer than petrol. From it electricity can be made for a fiftieth of tho present cost, and five or six goneratintr stations, with trunk lirrs radiating to all parts of the country, will turn every wheel in fhe Kmcdom lighi and heat thp homr.e. and do the cooking. A battleship could keep tue seas for a. year without a new supply of fueL"