Clippings.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume III, Issue 115, 15 October 1901, Page 3

Clippings.

MICROBE SLAYS LOCUST. The mighty sweep of the locust over the fields of Portugal lias at last been checked. Many means had been devised to stamp out the plague ; insectivorous birds had been let loose, poisons had been freely strewn about. Man seemed to battle in vain with these devouring pests. Triumph came to the lowly bacterium (says a despatch in the London Daily Mail). An ingenious professor at Coimbra thought out, the problem, and with the aid of the microbe, solved it. After many experiments the bacteriologist found that a microbe resembling that of cholera was most efiective. Large cultures were made and sprinkled over the locusts’ feeding-places. The insects were noticed after a few days to grow thin and weak, and finally to disappear. There seems to belittle doubt about the efficacy of the microbe to slay the locust, but after the locust is finished off the distressing question will arise as to what the microbe will turn his attention to then.

A FOOLHARDY ATTEMPT. H.M.S. Torch arrived at Auckland from the Islands on Friday. She reports that Mr Suxton, a journalist from Winnipeg, and Captain Voss, who undertook a voyage round the world in a canoe for 1000 dollars, arrived after fifty-nine days at *ea, at Penrhyn Island, on August 28th. They left Victoria, British Columbia, and experienced fine weather, and everything went smoothly. They proposed refitting there, and thence proceed to Sydney, up the coast of Queensland, through Torres Strait, across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez, and via Malta and Roca to London, thence to Halifax, on the east coast of Nova Scotia.