Items of Interest February 19, 1916 Issue

Items of Interest

The exports of oil-seeds from India in the year ended March 31, 1915, amounted to 953,900 tons, valued at £9,750,000, as against 1,582,000 tons, valued at over £17,000,000, in 1913-14. In normal years about 95 per cent of the exports goes to the countries at present involved in hostilities. Noticeable decreases occurred in the quantity and value of the exports of rape-seed, groundnuts, and sesamum. India has seen a great increase in recent years in the number of oil-mills worked by steam or other mechanical power. These crush all the more common oil-seeds, and this development has been especially noticeable in the case of mustard-oil and groundnut-oil. Mustard-oil manufacture is a flourishing industry in Bengal; there are several cocoanut-oil mills on the Malabar coast and in Cochin, and groundnut-oil mills in Bombay. Some of the larger mills deal with a great variety of seeds.

The board of engineers of flood control appointed by the supervisors of Los Angeles County, Cal., following the floods of 1914, has just rendered its report. Among the measures proposed as a part of the remedial program are these: conservation of storm waters through reforestation and retarding work in the mountains; spreading of storm waters on the gravel deposits at the mouths of cañons; acquisition of official channels for the principal streams on the lower levels and the permanent rectification and protection of these channels; diversion of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers from the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors to Alamitos Bay.

Russia has just opened for traffic the first line in her new double-tracked railroad from Petrograd to the Arctic Ocean. The section completed is 530 miles long, from the capital to Soroka on the White Sea. It will relieve and expedite the traffic now centered at Archangel when that port is open. Ordinarily it is closed by ice from October to May. This line will give Russia a port on the Arctic which is open the year round, due to the fact that the Gulf Stream pursues its course as far as the Arctic waters to the north of Ekaterina, and its backwashes touch the Lapland and Murman coasts. They prevent the formation of more than a thin film of ice over the harbor of Ekaterina, which is 400 miles nearer the Atlantic than Archangel. The road has been built through difficult country,—a land of morass and swamp. Ekaterina has a sheltered anchorage, where the waters are nearly always calm, even when the Arctic storms are raging. The water is from sixty to ninety feet deep.

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