THE INITIATIVE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 312, 27 May 1911, Page 8

THE INITIATIVE.

To the Editor. , r » P ,e ,leu ' s tllnt the petroleumseekers have sold their interest to people with plenty of capital is indeed welcome. .. work anil study is invaluable to the people of Australasia. Research means adding something new to the worlds knowledge. If it can be proved that a thing is money-making, people will put money into it. I have spent years studying the chemistry of New Zealand plants, and I expect' I am the premier, possibly the only, authority on the subject. Push and bounce are very distasteful to me, but how will people know unless I tell them? I am prepared to take a piece of wood and make it into its trade products—charcoal, wood tar, methylated spirit, potash-at any time and at any place. There is a vast forest of this peculiar wood, rata, within a few miles of Okato, estimated to contain one thousand acres, and,'say, 75 per cent, of this forest is of rata trees, a thin" unknown elsewhere, for cut-away bush shows all the rata still standing, this tree being avoided at the time of cuttin« because a child would fell it with a few iaggots set on fire around its trunk. This standing rate dies, and affords a way to test its quantity in ordinary bush and I would say it is not over 1 per cent. How, then, did this vast amount of rata concentrate about a mile above the new Money River bridge, opened two or three years ago to connect Oxford Road with Warea Road?—l am. etc IJ. M. LEVIXfiE, M.B.