TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Southland Times, Issue 18823, 17 May 1920, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

The financial authorities in Warsaw are planning to provide Poland with a new currency. "Slotny” it is to be called, says a Geneva correspondent to the New York Evening Post, and when it is established, will reduce to order and convenience a condition that in the everyday life of trade must often perplex the average citizen. Slotny, however, is an established Polish currency that circulates yet only in the imagination of the financiers, and for the practical purposes of business Poland has 10 or 12 different kinds of currency in circulation. There are the real Polish marks, popularly referred to as Kosciusko marks, issued Jhy the government, but there are also this 1,000,000,000 Polish marks issued by a consortium of Polish bankers during the period of German occupation and called “requisition money,” because it is covered by German requisition bonds and rests for security on the future German war indemnity. The German soldiers, moreover, put in circulation a great deal of currency, and to this must be added a vast number of

Austro-Hungarian crowns and an interestipz collection of roubles, the old Gear’s rouble, of which about 1,000,000,000 are Still circulating in Poland, the Kerensky rouble, a German rouble, issued for military purposes, and a Bolshevist rouble, that came in during the short time when the Bolsheviki occupied the Minsk district. To say nothing of such other currency as the Karbowanzys and the Hiriwny that got into circulation when part of present Poland was attributed to the Ukrainian Republic. Some day the financial authorities hope to exchange these various currencies into Slotny.

During the period of the war, the exhibitions of the Royal Horticultural Society were shorn to some extent of one of their features, namely, clipped yew or box in the shape of birds, balls, and obelisks. The return of topiary gardening may encourage this fashion of old English gardens with their order, sense of proportion, and restfulness. One hears already of a Scots gentleman who has given an ojder to the Royal Kew nurseries for a reproduction of his crest in clipped yew ! It consists of a pelican feeding its young on a nest; and it will take from five to six years to grow and train the trees.

It is well known that the natives of Peru, at the date of Pizarro’s conquest, had reached- a high degree of culture. One of their greatest works has recently roused renewed wonder on the part of modern' engineers. This is the irrigation canal constructed by order of Viracocha; the canal is 3J metres deep, and almost 650 kilometres long, running through the present departments of Huancavelica and Ayacucho; it converted the plains of Castrovilleina and Cangallo into flourishing pasture land. The work is all the more surprising when there is taken into consideration the nature of the land, which is between 3600 and 4800 metres above the level of the sea, and was encumbered with gigantic rocks that had to be removed without the aid of machinery, explosives, or iron implements. There were high slopes to be connected by bridges and mountain torrents that had to be turned to