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CURIOUS condition of affairs with respect to money prevails in the department of Narino, the southernmost department of Colombia, This region is isolated by poor means of communication from the central government and has regulated its own affairs to a great extent. When the rest of the country adopted a gold standard Narino refused to conform and enforced a local silver standard. As it accepts at silver value coins of all nations and dates it has become a dumping-ground, for coins no longer current elsewhere.

It is said that the most abundant coins are the old eight-real pieces of the early years of independence. A few years ago, we may add, the whole of Colombia was swamped with paper currency enormously depreciated. At one time it took 22,500 pesos of this paper to buy a United States gold dollar. The government has now issued a decree recalling the national silver coined before 1911 and all foreign money now in circulation.

He is not a millionaire's son. All this Colombian paper money is worth just one dollar. A paper peso is worth one cent

HE French engineers in the European war have reached a high degree of perfection in mathematics, according to Major-General Charles M. Clement, U. S. A., who made an exhaustive study of conditions on the firing line. These sappers of the French army have figured out the influence of the earth on a shell traveling out of a cannon,

how much farther it will shoot north than south, and to what extent the moon will deflect the shot. As a result, what is described as the ultimate error of the cannon shot is being rapidly overcome. Moreover, if a commander is unable to point a cannon within ten feet of the target, he is not regarded as a success.

ERHAPS it was his passionate love for farming, perhaps a dawning sense of art, or pride in the paternal acres which had come down to him through many generations of tillers of the soil, that induced the owner of a farm in Moulton, Northampton, England, to put the quaint gate shown in the accompanying picture at the entrance to the driveway leading to his farmhouse. Anyone who passes that gate will know that the owner of the estate is a farmer and so proud of it that he wants everybody to know it. The ornamentation is, to express it mildly, original in design and of striking appearance, but does not betray a high degree of artistic taste. However, it is symbolic of the farmer's calling, and who shall criticize?

An English farmer has decorated his gate with the various implements of his calling. If not artistic it is surely symbolic