NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3610, 8 March 1927, Page 1

NEWS AND NOTES.

Experts are examining the possibilities of a new aeroplane in which it is hoped to fly from Rome to London in an hour, and from Rome to New York in six hours by rising 25,000 feet where the rarefied atmosphere reduces the air resistance. The chief difficulty will be the provision of normal air pressures for the occupants and the correct functioning of the engines. “The gradual narrowing-in of the open range on the Kaingaroa Plain by the tree-planting operations of the State Forest Service is yearly restriclting the area of the great wild horse run, which once extended unbroken from Mount Edgecombe and Mount Tarawera right down to Ruapehu,” writes a correspondent to the “Auckland Star.” But when riding over those plains anywhere from the trans-Kaingaroa road to the llrewera country southward to the desolate Rangipo, one still sees numbers of' those untamed animals roaming the pumic country. It must take a great deal of foraging to obtain a satisfying feed on these scantily grassed places. Travellers along the motor roads who see these horses eyeing them from a. distance wonder what their origin was, and some have answered the question with the guess 1-linti they a rot he, descendants of horses brought here by the military during the chase of Te Kooti in 1869. However, Sir Douglas Mat-lean, of Napier and Wellington, and owner of the celebrated Moraekateaho sheep station in Ilawkes Bay, supplied me with the solution of the question reccnt- ! ly. In the early days—the exact ~iate lie could not recall —his father, the great Native Minister, Sir Donald Maclean, sent up from Marne,|r kakaho a stallion and several mares of a sturdy pony breed to he liber- ' a ted on the Kaingaroa Plain. The animals were a hardy kind, and Sir Donald believed that they were likely to become useful to the inland' Maoris, and perhaps pakeha settlors when they increased. They certainly increased, and they provided tiie Maoris with cheap and plentiful mounts.