Resourceful.

Otago Witness, Issue 2170, 26 September 1895, Page 49

Resourceful.

The Japanese are rimwkably ingenious. Their cleverly-constructed mermaids, formed from a fish and a monkey skin, were eminently successful in deluding the gullible show-loving public before the exposure of their manufacture by the late Frank Buekland. To this ingenuity they add infiuitc patience. "Do you know how the Japs get white Java sparrows ? " eaid a leading animal dealer to tho writer recently.

" They seleob a pair of greyish birds and keep them in a white cage in a white room, and they are attended by a person dressed in white. The mental effect on a series of generations of birds results in completely white birds. They breed the domestic cock with enormously long tails after the same principle. They firsts eelcct a bird with a good Uil, giving him a very high perch to stand on, then with weights they drag the tail downward, carrying on the same system with the finest specimens of his descendants till a tail almost as long as a peacock* is produced at la«t." And how marvellous they are in the fer* tilfntion of plants. Did any ot our readers evtr see one of their dwarf treca, perhaps 50 years old, and jet not more than an iach or two high ?