THROUGH Our EXCHANGES.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 27, 31 January 1913, Page 2

THROUGH Our EXCHANGES.

T-wo German cavalry officers, Lieutenant Von Hauer and Herr Joseph Paschen, have started on a ride on horseback from German South-west Africa to Berlin. They will pass til rough Windhoek, Salisberry, FashoKhartoum, Cairo, Jerusalem, Constant u.ople, and Vienna.

Four hundred bales of Chinese pigtails were recently sold by a Liverpool firm. These pigtails were made into tops in Bradford, and were used for hair belting, dolls’ hair, etc. Hair belting can be used for driving machinery where leather would soon rot and become useless.

Thirteen is not such an unlucky number after all. Attention has been drawn to the fact that Sir Solo, who won the Wellington Cup, was thirteenth on the card, drew thirteenth place, and the dividend might have been thirteen pounds, only that the 'papers dare not say what the dividend really was. Another horse that won (Grattan) was also number thirteen on the card. 1

Tests that have been made on the Atlantic liner Mauretania with the Marconi wireless compass have been attended with remarkable results. The captain has certified that by means of the invention he was able to locate reefs, derelicts, icebergs, ships, and land. It is claimed that a vessel equipped with the compass can safely steam at full speed in the densest fog.

Germany thriving prodigiously; a people well equipped in every way for all contingencies, full of organised energy; towns humming with industry, yet of well-kept and well-planned appearance; England mightily prosperous, but with a people showing a curious deterioration in fibre; unrest everywhere; Home Rule for Ireland neither one filing nor the other, an unsatisfactory makeshift, not likely to work; increasing interest in the Dominions over the seas, and appreciation of the need for the defence of Empire—such were some of the rapid impressions gathered by Mr, H. I. von fiaast through a year’s sojourn in ngland and Europe, from which he has just returned. He is convinced of the necessity for compulsory military training right throughout the Empire as the only way of maintaining British prestige and ensuring the Empire against attack.

For a couple of years the Sydney police have been endeavouring to get rid of what is regarded as a city nuisance caused by men standing in front of certain tailors’ shops. The touts have been driven from the footpath to the doorways of the shops, but a common practice of many has been to tap passers-by on the shoulder and invite them inside. This also is a legal offence, and consequently Daniel Benjamin had to appear at the Water Police Court to answer a charge of offensive behaviour in George Street. He pleaded guilty, and it was explained to Mr. Payten that he had interfered with four persons in ten minutes on January 2nd in the doorway of Myerson’s shop at 246, George Street. Some of the people he touched attempted to strike defendant, who had been repeatedly cautioned. A line of £5, in default "six weeks’ imprisonment, was imposed.

All have read of carnivorous plants, of laughing plants, and of plants that weep; but who has heard of a plant that coughs? There is the authority of a French botanist, however, for the statement that a plant in various tropical regions actually possesses the power to cough in the most approved manner. The fruit of this plant resembles the common broad beau. It appears that the coughing part is something of a crank, that it easily works itself into a rage, and that it has a curious horror of all dust. As soon as a few grains of dust are deposited on its leaves, the air chambers that cover their faces and are the respiratory organs of the plant become filled with gas, swell, and end by driving out the gas with a slight explosion and a sound that resemb.es so much the cough of a child suffering from a cold as to carry a most uncanny sensation to the one beholding the phenomenon.

The old method of chopping up whale blubber by hand has been superseded by mechanical means on the Norwegian whaling steamer llakiura. that arrived at Port Chalmers last Wednesday from Russell for docking. On this vessel four revolving knives out the blubber into small pieces on the main deck, whence it is transferred by means of an elevator much resembling a dredge ladder, to the deck above, where it is automatically distributed as required amongst the eight large trying-out, pots wherein the boiling-down process of separating the oil from the refuse takes place. It was stated unnuthoritafively that there were about 4000 casks of oil on board the vessel, the product of upwards of 200 whales, and that the value of each cask ran to about £5.