NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1210, 19 February 1914, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES.

Here we are individually worrying about a debt of £ BB, and collectively about a mere £88,000,000. But what about the Englishman and the Welshman ? According to a Parliamentary paper issued the other day, the local authorities in England and Wales at the end of the year ended March 31st last owed £413,712,000. And yet money is plentiful iu Londou. The whole world must be living on the other fellow. The question is: Who and where is the other fellow ?

Mrs Bulstrade, who traversed Mongolia in a caravan, states that the prison dungeons contain a number of refined Chinese who are shut up for life in heavy ironbound coffins, which do not permit them to sit upright. They are compelled to lie down and only see daylight lor a few minutes daily when food is thrown into the coffins through a small hole.

The old common belief amongst parents that children must at some time have an attack of certain infectious diseases, and that the sooner the infection comes along the better, was referred to by Dr C. Savill Willis, principal medical officer to the Department of Public Instruction in New South Wales, in a paper read before the public health section of the Medical Congress. As a consequence of this belief, he said, mothers were accustomed to purposely expose their children to infections. “In these days,’' he added, “thisis not done, as mothers know that it is not necessary for a child to have measles, scarlet fever, etc., and, consequently, more children now reach the school age who are still susceptible to the various infectious diseases-’’

In North Canterbury large numbers of horses working on the farms and stations are wearing streamers of bright red ribbon attached to the straps of their bridles behind their low-er jaws (says the Christchurch Press). Imagining that the red ribbon indicated that the horses were a remount reserve for Red Fed. cavalry, a recent visitor to the district made inquiries into the matter. He was quite reassured when be was informed that red ribbons were worn to scare off bot flies, which usually attack a horse on its lower jaw, but which leave animals so decorated severely alone. The red ribbons have proved quite effective as a preventative of bot fly attacks on horses, which seems to indicate that even that destructive pest scents danger in the red flag.