HERE AND THERE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3280, 24 January 1917, Page 62

HERE AND THERE.

Women as Farm Worker.'?. — The Wiltshire War Agricultural Committee has, according to the Daily Telegraph, ueeicieci to close down its training school for girl farm workers for the present, the results having been wholly disappointing. Air Strattoiij at a meeting of tne committee, said very few pupils stuck to the work. Women could be taught to drive milk carts or horses quite easily, but the monotony of actual milkim* became dreadful. London girls could not stand it. When these girls came from London to the country, he observed, their imagination was of lovely green fields, shady trees, and, in the near future, a colonial farm life wifch their soldier correspondent. But it all ended when they got to the actual life of the farm, with its mud, filth, and clouds. Mr Rogers, the Board of Agriculture representative, said that most of the girls were of a "flighty" disposition. Country girls turned out well, but town girls had not been able to face the loneliness and monotony of country life. Miss Oliver declared that London girls wore their host pupils at the training school, but they did not .'ike the work when they went on to the farms. In spite of the efforts of the Duchess of Beaufort, Lady Straehey, Lady Sybil Codrington, and others in Gloucestershire and Somersetshire, schemes to induce women to work on the land have been only moderately successful. Town girls from Bristol have not been available, because they have found remunerative employment in munition works, banks, and commercial offices. Two difficulties have militated against the schemes —poor 'wages offered compared j with other employment available, and the | general belief that women cannot do man's ; work on farms. Some women successfully ' essayed haymaking, hoeing, fruit picking, and other light duties, but fought shy of i milking cows, driving horses, and other | heavy work, especially in bad weather. j At the same time it must be admitted I that in many places farmers and labourers' | daughters and some others rave done ex- | cellent work in practically all departments of farming, but so far as other women are concerned experiments have been more • or Jess disappointing. j World's Largest Cargo -tearner.— The largest steamer ever built for cargo I carrying is the Milazzo, a new Italian j merchant ship. She is built as no other i ship has ever been built in the history j of the world. The prime idea of her construction was that she should be al !e to carry 14,000 tons of cargo and 4500 tons of oil fuel, and discharge the cargo in 43 hours without manual labour. This she has actually accomplished. On each side of the bottom of the vessel there j rims a railway. with two eets of lines in a tunnel with a A-shaped roof. This leaves room for similar tunnels at the .-ides of (he ship, into which the oil fuel is poured, to be pumped out as required : and in the centre is a further tunnel, which contains the pronellor shaft. The greatest novelty, however, is the A-roofed railways and other compartments mentioned. Doors, or j hatch.es. open at regular intervals on the I inside of the railway roofs, and as each ! is opened the canro tumbles into a little railway car, until"it is filled. The deck of the Milazzo is covered with a series of tall discharging towers. Each has a well that goes right down to the railway j line. The loaded ear is run to ;l\r- nearest I of these wells, where its body is matched off the wheels and hoisted "ip the well to a platform. Here it tips its contents into a monster chute, which conveys the coal or corn to a barge or railway truck for transport wherever necessary. The deck of the Milazzo looks queer, for it is covered with the hoisting towers and other machinery, so that there is very little ordinary deck room, but she has a length of 512 ft over ad and 65ft extreme? beam. Lord Mayor's Chain of Office.— The Lord Mayor of the City of London wears the most costly badge of office in England. It contains diamonds to the value of £120.C00, and each holder of it during his term of office is called upon to enter into a bond for its safe custody before he is -worn in. and thus becomes entitled to its possession. The jewelled ! collar worn by the Lord Mayor of London I is of pure gold, composed of a series of links, each formed of the letter S, a united York and Lancaster rose, and a massive knot. The ends of the chain are joined £iy the portcullis, from the points of which,

suspended by a ring of diamonds, hangs the jewel. The. centre collar contains 28 S's, 14 roses, 13 knots, and measures 64in. lite jewel contains in the centre the City Arms cut in cameo of a delicate line, on an olive ground; surrounding this a garter of blue, edged with white and cold, bearing the city motto in gold letters. i 'J he whole is encircled with a costly border i of gold S's, alternating with rosettes of diamonds ret in silver. The jewel is suspended from the collar by a portcullis. but when worn without the lollar is hung by a broad blue ribbon. London Dockers, — It has been estimated that on the average about 30,000 men daily seek for work at the docks ami wharfs of the port of London, and that about 20.000 men obtain it. In other words, iO.OOO men oil an average seek for work and do not find if. Similar conditions are met with in other large ports. It is the fluctuating demand for dock labour that lias led to the high rates of wages demanded by the men, and to bitter strikes. It is the high rate paid to the casual labojrer which lures men to the docks, and is constantly filling up the ranks of the under-employed. They overlook the fact that the high hour-rate is paid only for the actual time worked, and they do not take into account the hours of waiting and of unemployment for which no payment is received. Casual labour has been described as a subtle form of sweating. Engineers know that, even when idle, machinery requires watchful care, yet when the complex human machine is out of work it is often allowed to remain neglected and .uncared for. Coloured Bank-notes Abroad.— The Bank of England is the only bank which always issues plainly-printed whitepaper bank-notes, whatever their value. Other countries use printed notes in colours. The Russian notes are printed in all the colours of the rainbow. For the. one-colour Russian notes, blue, yellow, or bright purple inks are most favoured. The 100-franc note of France is printed in four colours—blue, pink, black, and yellow. German notes are mottled, while those of Austrian banks are extremely vivid in colour, and are printed in two languages, Slav on one. side and German on the other. A Swedish five-crown note is a little yellow thing, while that for 803 crowns resembles a big blue poster, for Swedish notes vary in size according to their value. Everyone has heard of the American "green-backs," so called from the green ink with which they are printed. The present English 10s notes printed in red ink arc not Batik of England notes, but Treasury notes. Substitute for Now Milk.— Just at titc moment when the milk problem is reaching an acute stage, Mr William Lawton, a member of the Society of Medical Officers of Health, comes forward with an interesting solution. lie claims, after months of experiemnt, to have found a satisfactory substitute for the real article (says our London correspondent). A small quantify of powder, redolent of the meadows, .ami described as "synthetic milk improver," is mixed with "water and boiled for a few minutes. It is then added to an equal quantity of cow's milk, and the result is a rich liquid, which, so far as I cotdd judge from the sample which I tasted, is indistinguishable from new milk. Mr Lawton's preparation lias the advantage ever other synthetic milks that it can be cooked. He did not reveal the ingredients, but put the cost at a penny a pint, so that mixing it with a, pine of cow's milk the total cost is fourpence per quart —the pre-war price of milk'. Finger l'rints.— One police authority states that there are 1,700.000.000 people in the world, and no two have finger prints that cannot be distinguished from one another. The line patterns on the feet and hands have been handed down front ancestors of countless thousands of years ago, and do not change during the life of an individual. The lines arc) due to ridges of litle papillae in the true underlying skin, which contain the sensory nerves and bloodvessels. These ridges are reproduced by the outer skin. The outer skin is being constantly worn away, but as it is renewed the lines are renewed with it. The finger-tips have furnished a wonderfully successful met!: id of ! tracking professional criminals. There is lan oily secretion in the skin, an:! when ! the finger-tips touch a brass door-knob, a pano'of glass, or any smooth, hard substance, they leave ail impression. The cleverest criminals have resorted to all sorts of tricks to remove the evidence of their finger prints. Some have gone so far as to slice off their finger-tins with a knife, lint apart from the shocking pain this must cause, if has the disadvantage of destroying the best part of their sense of touch. Kino: of Poland.— Tn the days when Poland was a kingdom no hereditary claim to the crown was ever recognised. "Whoever saw a King ! of Poland," writes Voltaire, "in the pride ! oi his majesty would think him the most absolute prince in Europe, yet he is certainly the least so." Every' Polish nobleman' had a right to take part in the election of the King, atid could stand for the post himself: but in practice the choice usually fell upon some prince from outside., clvieflv because the election depended on two factors —force and money. Tt was in Ibis, way that the throne fell to a German prince. 'Augustus the Elector, who bought half the voters, and used Ids army to persuade the other half. i '