there in the small hours of the morning, they are scanned for the last time by a veterinary expert from the Antipodes. Moreover, since our meat goes now to other British ports as well as to London, and since, too, nearly half of what is discharged in the Thames no longer finds its way to Smithfield, our inspectors have to follow our meat into the provinces and report upon the condition in which it reaches such towns as Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester. Furthermore, they do their best to track it a stage farther and ascertain its fate at the hands of the unsentimental retail trader. Most New Zealand meat is now honestly sold as what it is. Some of the best of it, however, is still palmed off on the consumer as British. On the other hand, South American mutton is sometimes passed off as New Zealand. The housewife who buys “Canterbury Lamb” because she likes all things Kentish is not yet altogether extinct. For all this the clumsily-drawn English law, which makes conviction so difficult, must be held mainly responsible. New Zealand butter, too, suffers at the hands of English manipulators. It is what Tooley Street calls a dry butter--that is to say, it contains on an average not more than some eleven per cent of moisture. This renders it a favourite for mixing with milk and for selling as “milk-blended” butter, a process at which makers in the colony can only look on wrathfully but helplessly. Otherwise they have little to complain about, for their butter has for years past brought them prices almost as high as those of good Danish, while during the butter famine of the first few months of 1908 as much as 150 shillings a hundredweight was paid for parcels of it. Before shipment in the colony, butter and cheese are graded by public inspectors. Every box bears the Government stamp. In practice the verdict of the grader is accepted by the English purchasers. Relatively the amount of frozen beef which we export is not large; but our climate and pastures are too well suited for beef-growing to make it likely that the discrepancy will continue. Probably frozen beef will give place to chilled; that is to say, improvements in the art of chilling will enable our beef to be carried at a temperature of, let us say, 30° Fahrenheit, instead of 12°. It will then arrive in England soft and fit for immediate use: thawing will not be needed, and a higher price will be obtained. But, however far behind New Zealand may as yet lag in the beef trade, enough has been done in other branches of refrigeration to show how scientific, well-organised, and efficient colonial industry is becoming, and how very far the farmers and graziers of the islands are from working in the rough and hand-to-mouth fashion that settlers in new countries are supposed to affect. [Illustration: WELLINGTON]