CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 276, 14 April 1913, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

WATER CATCHMENT AREA. The desirableness of the direct control by the Borough Council of the borough catchment area cannot be over-empha-sised. At the present time there is too bi<* a loop-hole for contamination of the town supply, and the following paragraph culled from the Town Clerk's annual'report, will therefore be of interest:—" At the present time the Council own at the intake at Mangorei only 1 acre 1 rood 12 perches of land, along the eastern bank. It is, therefore, manifestly impossible for the Council to exercise that supervision over the catchment area in the vicinity of the intake that is desirable in work of this nature. Sooner or later, therefore, it will be necessary, to acquire certain other lands forming* part of the watershed of the river above the intake, and as the lands become cut into smaller farms this need will become more apparent, both with a view to preventing the bush from being depleted and to prevent undesirable conditions arising. Ido not wish it to be thought that undesirable conditions exist or have existed in the past in the watershed. As far as T am aware the best of conditions prevail, but none the less certain portions of this area should be in the. hands of the Council in order to prevent the possibility of anv undesirable conditions arising in the future."

THK FINANCIAL STRINGENCY. Broadly speaking, the world's financial stringency may be said to be due to the huge expenditure of the nations for defence and social reform, the multiplication of wants in all of the people, and the progress of science, in constantly opening new avenues for commercial ami industrial development, with the consequential demand for new capital to finance this expansion. The future, perhaps the near future, will be equal to this evergrowing strain. The stringency that we are experiencing in New Zealand is due to the difficulty of obtaining outside capital, and not to any decline in the volume of our exports.' The banking returns for the past quarter show that the banks have sceeeded in restricting advances which they were justified in doing owing to the contraction of the deposits. Recently there have been complaints as to the state of trade, merchants and retailers finding it slacken. That there is some justification for the complaints is. borne out by the shrinkage in the circulation. Although the decrease is onlv about £">000 it is the first movement of the kind we have had for some years. Viewing the bank- position as a a whole, we hav to realise that we are feelins 'with others the scarcity of money, and •this can be met by economies in expenditure and bv increasing the volume of our exports. The value of our exports for the vear ended March 31 amounted to £20.550.109. as compared -with £17.fi04.R70 in the previous year, a •Tiiiii of £•2.07-5.230. and if we moderate our imports and eschew extravagance, wo will not feel th° p'nch very much. — Wellington "Dominion."

SYNTHETIC RUBBER. Tm the course of an article in Harper's Monthly, on the romance of inrlnstriiil research. Dr. Robert Kenncrv Duncan. Professor of Chemistry at the TJniversit'* of PiUsburar, traces briefly the work that lists led up to the commercial development of synthetic rubber, and shows that by the most apparently trivial means artificially-produced rubber has become an accomplished fact. In lSlill an Englishman. Oreville Williams, isolated from the destructive distillation of rubber a colorless linuid now named isoprenc. lie discovered that the liquid on standing became viscid, and that on subsequent distillation it hardened to a. white spnnsrv mass, which was pure rubber. In ISS-2 Sir William Tilden actually prepared rubber from isoprenc Intreating it witli hydrochloric acid, and in IS!V2 he found that some old specimens of isoprenc. obtained from turpentine, had converted themselves into rubber without his help. Tn 1907 Fritz TTnfmann, a fienuan scientist, converted isoprenc into ruhlier by a simple process, and in 1010. with dramatic coincidence. Harries, a Dutchman, and Matthews, an English experimenter, independently discovered an easy and apparently commercially useful method of effecting the change. Tt is from the researches of 1010 that Mr. Duncan dates the practical utility of artificial rubber. Isoprene '

and analogous matter had been produced from various substances before that time, but not in commercial quantifies or with commercial exactitude. The necessity of the situation now is a cheap raw material. "Some," the doctor says, "start from turpentine, others from fusel-oil, still others from starch, and much may be said as a starting-point in rubber synthesis for petroleum." There is little doubt that as a result of the experiments now being made synthetic rubber will soon be on the market in competition with natural rubber.

THE MONEY MARKET. The current issue of the "Trade Review," referring to the state of the money market, remarks: "We often hear complaints all round as to the tightness of money, and there is undoubtedly a decided shortness in the supply of money available for all pur- J poses. The banking returns for the March quarter arc not available so far, but there is no doubt that when these figures appear they will bear out this statement. Our exports for the current season to the end of March show the very satisfactory increase of some £1,850,000 over the previous season, and this should have helped the situation very materially, but apparently our imports are still keeping up an over high level, and the financing of these is making heavy demands on the funds of the hanks. The Post Office Savings Bank rate of interest has been liaised y 4 per cent., making 3% per cent. In the second half of last year there was an excess of withdrawals of £138.081. and probably there has been a continuance, of this movement in the quarter just closed. Which has induced the Government to take this step in order to stop this re-, duction of deposits." ■ GTSBORNE'S EXPERIMENT. The. Edison-Breach storage battery; cars have undergone their trial in Gisborne successfully, and will be put in full; (commission "shortly*. ,«i(' the new system the local "Herald" says: —Gisborne is more advanced than the other communities in that it has ventured on the most modern form of tramways traction, the storage battery cars, and if the experiment proves successful in regard to economy of operation as anticipated, our trams should be on a much better basis for paying their way than others which have been constructed on the expensive overhead trolley system. So far. the Gisborne tramcars have falsified the predictions of engineering critics who said that they would be unable to accelerate. The trains are prompt in getting under wav after a jtop and quickly gain speed, and careful observation of their running the past few days goes to indicate that the consumption of electrical current is very moderate, giving promise of satisfactory results. The advantage of the storage battery system, of course, is that it makes no call on the electrical plant of the briroush during the hours when the lighting load is on; the batteries in the ears can be boosted up at any time when the demand of the town for current is slack, this bein« a factor tendin? very greatly to economy of operation."