NEWS AND NOTES

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2655, 6 November 1923, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES

“I visited Pipiriki 25 years ago,” remarked a member of the Wanganui Borough Council, “and at that time, on the opposite side of the river, there was a couple of hundred of acres of beautiful clear country, in fact, the historic site of an old battle ground. I was in Pipiriki again recently. The same land is now smothered with fern and noxious weeds, with gorse run riot .10 feet high.” There is going to be a shortage of ham for the Christmas needs. Factories advise that they are in the awkward position of having booked several hundred more hams than they are holding. Pigs' have advanced to such a price that they cannot possibly supply at rates that were ruling a month ago. Orders have been refused for several hundred hams in Wanganui alone this last three weeks.

Thomas Nagle, aged 53, while walking on the river bank at. Albury, encountered a tiger snake, and at. the same time felt a sharp prick on the calf of his right leg. He sacrificed the leg on the spot, and rubbed nicotine from the stem of his pipe into the wound. After receiving medical attention he walked home, where lie collapsed and was removed to the hospital. Subsequently he died. An examination showed that, he had not been bitten by the snake and that death was due to nicotine poisoning. It. is well known that different magistrates regard breeding rabbits as a serious offence, but in Court precints of at least one Courthouse in Otago, not a hundred miles from Oarnaru (says the Mail) there exists a small and healthy family of rabbits. The mother and her descendants live in the large cellar under the building and periodically take the sun in the Court ground. It is said that a Supreme Court official passing through the grounds was nearly upset by the chasing of a member of the rabbit family bv a watchful fox terrier intent on his quarry. A cynic gives it as his opinion that the rabbits haunt the cellar to take note of the comments of the Court in rabbit cases.

“We must wipe out the small, inefficient school, and do away with the incompetent teacher,” said Dr. J. W. MThvraith in an address given at Auckland on the value of education. “There are no fewer than 1,500 small sole-charge schools scattered throughout the isolated districts of New Zealand, and this represents almost one-quarter the total number of schools. The sole teachers are required to teach all classes and all subjects and at the same time they are the least experienced, as well as the lowest paid, in the whole profession! I admire many of them for the good work they do in very difficult circumstances, but as a rule they are either young and inexperienced, or else they have taken up teaching because they failed at something else. A system that puts one-quarter the total number of schools into the hands of the inexperienced and the failures is a system that we should not tolerate/’ ~