HERE AND THERE.

Waipa Post, Volume VI, Issue 281, 16 January 1914, Page 4

HERE AND THERE.

Every shearing season fresh records are put up with the shears, and this season is no exception to the rule, three champions having already sprung into existence. In the South Wairarapa a few days ago a shearer reeled off 234 sheep in eight hours. The next big tally comes from Wairoa, Hawke’s Bay,where a lusty native named Te Mao Onekawa turned out 275 sheep in eight hours forty minutes. And now a Hastings Maori has put the other records in the shade by shearing 314 sheep in 8% hours. The untimely laying of an egg by a hen in a crate caused a strike at the North Eastern Railway joint station at Leeds recently. A porter in moving a crate of live hens noticed that one of the birds had laid an egg, and slipping his hand through the bars of the crate he took the egg out and placed it on his barrow for safety. A railway detective at once arrested the porter and took him and the egg to the railway station. Within a few minutes all the railway staff on duty ceased work until the district superintendent was informed of the incident. He ordered the man’s release and the staff returned to work. Mr T. Takahashi, who represents the Government woollen mills at Tokio, Japan, has been attending the wool sales in Napier, with a view to reporting on the quality of New Zealand wool and the methods of conducting sales here. Mr Takahashi informed a New Zealand Times reporter that all the material for the uniforms of the Japanese army was manufactured in Tokio at the Government mills, which employed 1500 men. Prior to coming to the Dominion, he attended the wool sales in Sydney. This is the second year the Japanese have bought New Zealand wool, though it is Mr Takahashi’s first visit. He states that he will come again next year, and successive years. He was very pleased with the Napier wool, and it is estimated that he bought about 2000 bales. After attending the Wellington sale he will go on to Christchurch, and it is quite possible that he will send about 5000 bales of New Zealand wool to Japan. The Cook County Council has embarked upon a good roads movement, and recently sent its county engineer on a tour through New Zealand to inspect the various methods for the application of tar. The engineer, according to a northern exchange, reported that as the result of his enquiries he favours a system for county roads similar to that adopted at Eltham, where the road was scarified and macadamised and thoroughly rolled (water bound), and subsequently, after the surface had set, was thoroughly swept and the tar applied and dressed with sharp, clean sand. The tar used amounted to about one quarter gallon per square yard, and was heated to HO deg. centigrade. For roads with heavy traffic he recommended the system adopted at Hawera. There, he reported, excellent work had been done

with the use of a material called tarvia. The engineer explains that roads which have been previously metalled and present a smooth surface could be coated with tar and sand from 9d to is per square yard, which, for an 18ft road, would cost from £5 to £6 12s per chain, whilst heavy traffic roads could be treated as at Hawera at 3s 8d per yard, or at a cost of about £24 per chain. The council has set up a committee to go into the matter.

If industrial discontent and unrest are contributory causes of inefficiency and recklessness in individual workers these causes are in their turn the effects of' other causes, and it is to the removal of these deeper sources of evil that the efforts of social reform should be directed. And in this task a due consideration of the psychological factors of the problem will be an aid of no small value. Lying beneath most of the varied manifestations of disorder and eccentricity in modern life may be detected as a potent influence the difficulty of nervous adaptationtoatoorapidly changing environment. Even the firmest believer in the essential capacity of the race would hardly maintain that human intelligence has progressed in a degree at all commensurate with the development and multiplication of the numerous instruments devised and fashioned by those gifted and subtle intellects whose discoveries have revolutionised science since the middle of the last century. It is to the new environment of ideas and sensations created by these discoveries, and by their practical applications, that we have to adapt ourselves to-day; and the process, alike for society and the individual, must at best be slow and arduous, and will inevitably be attended with such occasional failures as find expression in the spread of social and industrial unrest, with an accompanying growth of neurosis. — The Lancet.