TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Southland Times, Issue 18854, 21 June 1920, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

That China exported, in 1018. tome 5,664,000 more fresh eggs than in 1917 is an interesting indication of the growing cosmopolitanism of the China egg, not, to be sure, the deceptive and indestructible china egg that human ingenuity invented to fool the hen, but the real China egg laid in a Chinese hen yard and gathered,one likes to imagine, by the Chinese farmer's daughter. Mr P. S. Heinzlcman, the U.S. Consul-Gen-eral in China, has been studying the Tientsin egg-producing industry’ and he reveals the Chinese egg as a great traveller. Originally the eggs travelled without their shells for dried eggs entered into international commerce some time before the fresh egg first started on what might be called its individual journey. As the industry began with an equipment cf trays and drums for dryings the eggs, which imparted also a metallic content to the product, the earlier stages of the business were handicapped by its methods, and Chinese ingenuity must needs invent u method of blowing an egg into a heated chamber in a fine spray, which was transformed into powder that contained nothing but egg. So nowadays a continuous procession of egg shells in emptied and millions of pounds of dried egg are produced for exportation to foreign cooks, bakers and confectioners. Exportation of fresh eggs followed, and during the war the proportion of fresh eggs increased, and that of dried eggs diminished. And now. before long, the real China egg will travel frozen, for the first steamer with a cold-storage equipment for eggs will presently be voyaging between Tientsin and San Francisco.

An ancient city’ has been discovered in Mesopotamia, bordering the Tigris River for some 20 miles, yet so well ‘'lest” that a traveller, approaching it under ordinary circumstances, would have merely noticed the presence of a number of low, scattered mounds, and gone his way, without realising that here was once a city. One must go higher up and look down on the arrangement of the mounds before one realises their relation to each other, and sees the plan of the city: and this is what happened, says the London Sphere, when Lieut.-Col. C. A. Beazeley noticed the mounds from an airplane, and took aerial photographs of them. Blue prints were made from the photographs and when these wore supplemented by the measurements of surveyors working on the ground, the plan of the city was revealed os it might have been by its own architects and builders, if such plans were then customary. The ruins extend above and below the present town of Samara, and show that the forgotten eity, here following the left bank of the river, was from one to two and a half miles in width, with wide streets intersecting at right angles, and with larger blocks near the river, indicating that here were the homes of the wealthier citizens. One secs in the plan what was probably a large public garden, with a pavilion in the centre, and discovers also the square forts that protected the town from enemies, or perhaps the authorities from mobs, as well its the remains of the irrigation system that helped its gardeners. How old the city may be is not yet determined, but evidences of considerable antiquity have been discovered in the ruins.