GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2121, 29 April 1920, Page 1

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

■lt is slated that draught, horses suitable for country work are in great demand in the South Island. They have risen in . price a good many pounds sterling during the last month. Not long ago £3O was thought to bo a'good price for a horse, but now they are double that figure if of the right stamp. One Melbourne man has discovered a way of getting a high price for his goods without laying himself open to a. charge of profiteering (says the Sydney Bulletin). Having become possessed of a number of bricks that he had no immediate use for, he notified builders of a sale by auction. The goods cost dtim £3 5s a thousand, and builders are so hard-pressed that he sold the lot at from £4 to £5 12s (id. It was fair trading. The buyers fixed their own prices. .. •

An experienced prospector has been prospecting in the Tararuas for the past few weeks, and, like all his predecessors, has found gold and silver-bearing quartz. This he has sent to Wellington, and the result of the assay is reported as 2oz. gold and 14oz. silver to the ton of rock. Further than this, the prospector has discovered a huge deposit, estimated at thousands of tons, of pure white marble. This find is reported to be in the vicinity of Mount Holdsworth, some distance further in.—Carterton News.

In the course of his “stock jottings” in the Farmers’ Union Advocate, “Agricola,” the South Island correspondent, states : —“Fine weather is enjoyed by stock, tjud they do well in it. The present time is no exception. It is', however, a comparatively poor grass year. Not only is pasture feed short, but what, there is shows also a lack in quality. Cattle have not done well, and they have become a drug in the market. Good young stuff is almost unsaleable, and there is nothing for it but, to carry over till better times come. No doubt the fact.that most of the turnips will be wanted for sheep is helping to lower the price of store cattle. They are a nuisance in the winter unless there is plenty of rough feed for them. Straw stack’s are very useful for cattle, and it is a pity that so much good feed in this respect is burned each autumn. A good deal of it .could be stacked out in grass paddocks for stock to chew at during the winter, but instead it is simply burned as soon as the grain is got away after threshing.” A system of taking baby footprints has been adopted in New York for purposes of identification in a children’s hospital and day nursery. The step was taken after the complaint of a young mother, the wife of. aiui American soldier, that she feared that the baby the hospital physicians assigned to her was not. hers. She refused to be convinced until she had the records of the institution brought to her, and it was found that the only other baby born about the same time as hers' was a negro child. To avoid a similar experience l , the physicians thought of taking the finger prints of the new-born babies, but that did not prove satisfactory. The footprints, however, came out beautifully, and as a means of identification never failed. Immediately after birth of the child the fingerprint of the mother and the footprint of the child are taken and filed away, together with' the other records in the case.