The Seaforth News, 1950-02-23, Page 3Scotland's New
Forestry Village
\Wagons -loaded with lttasbande,
wives and children atop of furniture
winded their way along the Gouk-
stene Burn to a milestone marked
Ae, which will have a place in
tomorrow's history books. Ae, jug
north of lhrntfriee in southern Scot-
land, is Britain's first new forestry
village.
Forestry has come to meau for
Scotland. a great deal more than
the growing of trees and produc-
tion
roducttion of timber for industry. The
combination of the forest and bice
village dependent on it marks
a hitherto ueglected means for
resettling men and women in the
sparsely populated highland glens
and lowland valleys. Teu families
have occupied their homes in Ae
and another 16 are moving into
houses almost completed. Soon the
village of Ae will have about 90
'houses with a population of nearly
400.
The.Forest of Ae is just 20 years
old, and is still a forest in the .
making. Of its area of more than
10,000 acres, some 3,000 acres have
been planted. Already its thinnings
are yielding about 3,000 long tons
of timber annually for pit props
and fencing stakes. When fully
planted, the forest will produce an-
nually more than 7,000 long tons
of timber.
The plantations are composed en-
tirely of coniferous trees, which
product the softwood timber needed
in such enormous quantities by
modern industry, Among the most
popular species is bhe'Sitka spruce,
a native of the western coasts of
North America, whichstrangely,
i
grows more rapidly n Scotland
thatt its European relatives do, The
Soots pine and the Japanese larch
are other varieties which add orna-
ment to the forest by their con-
trasting foliage.
The road • along the valley runs
through the farm land, with the
plantations rising on the steeper
hillsides. This is typical of what
happens when new forests are cre-
ated in Scotland, the best land
bei ng kept under cultivation,
But forestry is a vital industry for
Britain. Twice in the present cen-
tury its woodlands have been
*tripped to meet war emergencies.
Two-thirds of all the timber stand-
ing in 1939 was felled and reserves
eperificed to save shipping space.
The result was the gravest timber
shortage Britain has ever known.
Trees take time to grow, and
careful planning is proceeding to
create 5,000,000 sores t$ productive
vymodlands in Britain in the next
50 years, Tine involves government
planting of 5,000,000 acres of bare
ground, and the re -stocking, mainly
by private owners, of Britain's • ex-
. Hag 2,000,000 acres of woodlands.
Scotland alone, the Forestry
omission has 150 forests and
this number will increase.
The village of Ae is but a fore-
eunner of other forest villages
which will be created h Scotland
to ensure that BrItain's hillsides
yield as much tinnber as its land
can produce. Before World War II,
95 per cent of pit props used in
Britain were imported, but within
10 years one-third of these will be
homegrown.
WHY ? Lots Of Canadian
Kids Would Like To Know Too
At 11 a boy thinks of baseball and bubblegum and --
just maybe, youth being what it is—of hydrogen bombs,
Eddie Rutsky of Cleveland Heights, is just such a boy.
At breakfast the other Morning hisQfathel', Dr. Paul P.
Rtttsky, and mother discussed the horrendous bomb, Eddie
began asking questions, "Some of these questions I could
not honestly answer without being cynical," 1)r. Rutslcy,
a dentist, said. "I felt tint the replies would destroy his
faith in his parents, teachers, government and humanity
in general. His being taught idessFstic and democratic
principles. in school made use ashamed that 1 had not the
Wisdom and choice of words to answer," Curious, sensitive,
persistent Eddie Rutslcy was determined that someone
should answer his question; "Why the hydrogen bomb?" .
So he wrote a letter to President Truman, a letter his
father came upon and which is reproduced here, He hopes
he'll get an answer,
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"Self -Help" Among
Animals and Birds
Certainly there is something in
"instinct, especially the instinct of
self-preservation. A sheep with in-
ternal trouble will deliberately seek
out particular herbs which it knows
will be "helpful' 'to it and eat them.
A cat similarly afflicted will go for
grass in a big way, Foxes occa-
sionally get jaundice, a complaint
accompanied by fever, but usually
manage to cure themselves simply
by going without food for a day or
two,
Birds, too, have the sane sure
instinct for self-help. They will
plaster a broken bone with mud,
which dries over the fracture and
acts as a splint.
Others, having sustained a super-
ficial flesh wound, will look around
for some soft substance, such as
sheep's wool, and twineit around
the injured part with their beaks.
Again, birds of the hawk tribe
sometimes get "liverish" when their
food is not just right. Then a vice
Cm will often be seen deliberately
eating grit and even small stones;
both of which prove an excellent
physic for such complaints.
In doctoring themselves the crea-
tures of the wild have an import-
ant advantage over. their human
counterparts. They are not cursed
with imagination, They never worry
about the possible dangers of. blood -
poisoning or picture the dire cala-
maties which all to often beset the
more imaginative human.
The result is that Nature has
ideal conditions in which to exert
her own healing powers. And unless
the injury is too severe a shock to
When Abraham Lincoln
Got Really Tough
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Lincoln lore contains many stor-
ies of the Great Emancipator's
leniency toward military offenders.
Scarcely ever did he decline to re-
mit sentences—at least to some
extent. However, when faced with
a situation that threatened the
stability of the Union Army and
thus, victory itself, Lincoln could
be ruthless—and was.
This is proved by a Lincoln
pronouncement recently come to
light and now. in the noted Alden
S. Condiot collectiott.iu New York."
Lincoln had to combat a sinater
home -front evil, It was the "sub-
stitution racket" spawned by the
loose draft law of that day. This
measure enable any man drafted
for service to buy, for $300, a sub-
stitute to take his place.
Like Prohibition years later, this
tees duck soup for the hoodlums
anti gangsters. A substitution
racketeer would Collect los $300
Isom a man drafted in New York,
sign up in the army and within a
few days desert, He would then
hop over to, say, Jersey City, as-
sume another name, contact another
willing draftee with $}300, and tat -
peat the ptrfoormesess,
There were thousands of tl ese
racketeers. How Union Army
strength was sapped is indicated
by the fact that "Bounty Jumpers"
accounted for more then 268,000
desertions.
Lincoln's firm attitude toward
these racketeers is shown by tate
message shown here, referring to
an appeal for executive clemency
by five men convicted of the crime
and sentenced to be shot as traitors.
Here is the text of the telegram
to Maj. -Gen. George C. Meade,
herb of Gettysburg:
Washington, D,C.
August 27, 1863
Major-General Meade,
Warrenton, Va,
Walter, Rainese, Feline, Lee &
lCerhnt appeal to me for mercy,
without giving any grounds for it
Whatever, I understand tame ors
very flagrant eases, and that you
deem their punlelhment as being
indispensable to bhe merles. l.f 1
am not mistaken in this, please let
them know at once that their ap-
peal is denied,
A, Lincoln
Vela sta;rnt message *ovmtlsd the
doO;t kaeoll of ON) 00145 /visor -sits,
the victim's nervous system, or like-
ly to cause death by a loss of blood,
a speedy cure is usually effected.
Wounded animals will perform
amputations upon thntselves to save
their lives. There was a remarkable
instance of this not long ago on a
farm.
A rat had been raiding a barn
of fodder, and the farmer had sus-
tained'such losses that he deterntin-
de at last on drastic steps, and set
a breakback trap. It was much
against his will, for being a humane
man he detested these snares.
Next day the raider was caught
in the trap by one leg and was still
alive. Intending to end the animal's
suffering, the farther approached the
trap, but before he reached it the rat
freed itself by biting clean through
its own leg bone. Next moment it
was gone. Gone, yes—but not to die.
To -day that three-legged rat is
still occasionally seen about tine
farm, for the farmer says quite
plainly that he hasn't the heart to
shoot it or try *to trap it again, so
profoundly was he impressed by its
courage and endurance.
"As a matter of fact," he says,
"I don't believe 'Old Tripod' as we
call him, would ever allow himself
to be trapped again. Rats are canny,
and aren't usually taken twice by
the same means."
A -Bomb Effect
Felt 2000 Miles
Fitton writers are not the only
people who tackle "whodunnit"
problems. One of the biggest photo-
graphic - companies in America
found that their films and plates
were getting fogged during stor-
age. That was in New York—a
few months after the first test
atomic bomb had been secretly
exploded in New Mexico, well over
two thousand miles away.
At that time, the photographic
company did not know that there
had been an atomic explosion. But
they traced the fogging trouble to
the etrawboard of the boxes used
for storage. This strawboard, made
specially for them by a paper man-
ufacturer in Indiana, was giving
off unusual radio -active particles.
By the time .their investigations
had got as far as this, the New
Mexico explosion was no longer a
war -time secret. But even this did
not solve the mystery. The In-
diana mill was a thousand utiles
from the site of the test bomb ex-
plosion; and the radio -active straw -
board had been made three weeks
after'
Then it was realized that the
paper mill dreW water very heavily
from a river, and bhe river was
found to be the source of the radio-
active vontamimation. In fact, if
batches of strawboard were made
soon after heavy rains in the catch-
ment districts of this river, the
hoard fogged films and plates even
more. Minute amounts of radio-
active substances, formed in the
New Mexico explosion, had fallen
upon soils over a wide area. Rain
washed thein into rivers, and then
the river water put them into paper
and board made at the milll
This amount of radio -activity
would not endanger health, though
it was enough to cause fogging of
photographic plates. Indeed, the
areae company had had sniffler
trouble some time before, when the
fogging was traced back to radio-
active cardboard made from sal-
vaged waste. Faulty self -luminous
dials nsade of cardboard at a war-
tme factory and had goneinto
salvage for re -pulping, and the tiny
amount of radia -active paint from
this source had been enough to
give fogging trouble.
Ice Worms—They're
Not Jokes Now
Until very recently you would
not have been in Alaska more than
a week before some veteran of a
dozen polar winters told you—with
a broad wink—about the ice -worms
that crawl across rhe icecap.
, The veterans rolled up with
laughter when last spring a Cana-
dian explorer said he saw scores
of ice -worms on one of Alaska's
smaller glaciers, for the Alaskan
classes ice -worms with the Loch
Nees Monster—they are something
to joke about, "a relative of the
unicorn."
But they are no longer able to
pull the greenhorn's leg about
worms that live in arctic ice for
hundreds of years. Because a Bri-
tish explorer has returned from the
giant Seward Ice Cap with a bottle.
ful of glacier -worsts.
He is Dr. N. E. Odell, and his
bottled worms cap a remarkable
career of exploration. Odell climbed
to within 2,000 feet of Everest's
summit and saw Malory and Irving
leave their last camp for the crest
of the great peak, never to be seen
again. Twice he has been to Spitz-
bergen, and last autumn he climbed
the highest mountain in Canada,
15,000 -ft. Mt. Vancouver (on the
"Yukon -Alaska border), which had
never been climbed before, It was
here, on the surface of the Seward
Glacier, that he saw—and saught—
the legendary ice -worsts. He de-
scribes them as "bits of wriggling
black cotton against the white
snow."
We have yet to learn what the
ice -worm finds to eat in polar
glaciers, hots it breeds, or how long
it lives. What we do know is that
when Odell touched them they very
quickly died—the warmth of his
hand literally burned them up.
There are about 5,500 islands and
islets around the coast of the
British Isles.
Man's Best Friend?
P-h.owo"e-y:
A Texas collie named Tip, we
read, fell ill love with his owner';
automobile. He waisted to sleep
near the car, even in wintry weath-
er. When, at last, the old bus was
sold, Tip refused to sat. Hia toaster
bad to ask the new owner to bring
tl'e ear where Tip could find it.
Tip did, and he's eating again. But,
apparenty, he's taken up residence
with the car, not his master.
This is a bit of news that could
shake our confidence as dog lovers
to its very foundations. Have we
been wrong all along? Is it merely
infatuation for some heartless thing
we own, not affection for ourselves
uhane?
Nothing, we have believed, could
p v ve more guileless flattery, un-
sullied by ulterior aims, than the
unfailing, tail -wagging exuberance
of I:lnter's welcome house. Could
it he. after all, just souse tawdry
attachment to our watch chain?
And that soulful gaze from Hilde-
s,arde's hig brown eyes. as we reach
down to scratch behind her furry
ears! Maybe it's just a special kind
of canine ecstary at being -close
ro that old, overstuffed easy chair.
Fret ass she thinks the chair does
the scratching.
We don't like to contemplate
such notions. We'd much rather
disntiss Tip as an atypical. abnorm-
al. egregious, teratogenetic canis
familiaris, or the whole .story as
just another tall tale from Texas.
Really Busy Bees
After experiments lasting four-
teen years, scientists have succeed-
ed in breeding bees which are more
industrious than their ancestors.
These busier bees have been pro-
duced by insentinating,gtteen bees
artificially under microscopes. The
scientists bred and cross -bred var-
ious types of bees until they got
exactly the insect they were seek-
ing. The new breed has already
proved that they can produce more
honey than any other kind of bee.
They are also healthier, gentler and
more resistant to disease.
Merry Menagerie-Bywratt Disney
"Oh, I'm terribly soary—I didn't
know It was loaded!"
ONE GAME WHERE BOTH SIDES LOSE
Nobody Wins A Strike—Newschart above shows graphically how long a worker has to labor
to make up the wages he lost through being on strike. In the recent steel strike, each worker
lost about $400. In addition to strikers themselves, thousands of workers in other industries
lose wages through being laid off because of material shortagees caused by the strike,
JITTER
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7O THE GAN
By Arthur Pointer
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