NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9617, 15 September 1894, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

British India has 10,417 licensed opium shops. Siberia has 5,000,000 square miles of good farm land. An express engine consumes ten gallons of water per mile. Labour bureaux are to be established throughout Spain. One-third of the world is controlled by the Anglo-Saxon race. Of the English Bench of Bishops twelve are pledged abstainers. The sulphur industry of Japan is undergoing considerable expansion. No fewer than 917 of the 15,000 cabmen of London are between 60 and 70 years of

age. The United States has a lower percentage of blind people than any other country in the world.

The spring and autumn manoeuvres of European armies cost annually over £2,000,000. Upright handwriting is becoming the fashion in America. It is said to be both elegant ancr legible. Jamaica is growing greatly in favour with English and Americans as a winter health resort and climatic cure.

The backs of the garden -seats on London omnibuses are being filled up to stop the wholesale picking of ladies' pockets. The grave of Eve is visited by over 40,000 pilgrims each year. It is to be seen ab Jeddah in a cemetery outside the city walls. x Zebras are being trained to run in harness by Lord Rothschild. One was driven in a dogcart through London streets recently. It is proposed to construct a grand canal between the Baltic and the Blask Seas, chiefly by connecting the rivers Dnieper and Dwina.

The Mayor of Lyons has refused an offer of £2000 made him by an Englishman for the carriage in which M. Carnob was riding when assassinated.

One of Byron's curls, duly authenticated, was offered for sale at a public auction in London. It was described as one of the poet's best-behaved curls. The famous vine at Hampton Court Palace, which is 126 years old, this season is bearing 1200 bunches of grapes. The fruit belongs to the Queen. The great wealth of the Duke of Westminster may be imagined from the facb that in charity alone he spends sixty thousand pounds (£60,000) a year. A German officer is on his way to find an island in the Pacific, where he and his associates can live the life of monkeys, subsisting solely on fruits, and going naked. While Sarah Bernhardt was performing in Glasgow recently a workman was so carried away that he rushed on the stage to protect her, as he believed, from hor lover. A young Italian doctor has published a pamphlet, recommending the occupation of firmly holding the tongues of persons taken with syncope as a sure means of restoring life.

South American ants have been known to construct a tunnel three miles in length, a labour for them proportionate to chat which would be required for men to tunnel under the Atlantic from New York to London.

The dryesb place in the world is that part of Egypt between the two lower falls of the Nile. Rain has never been known to fall there, and the inhabitants do nob believe travellers when told that water can fall from the sky. The most wonderful cliff dwellings in the United States are those of the Mancos, in a southern Colorado canon. Some of these caves are 500 or 600 feet from the bottom of the perpendicular sides of the canon wall, and how their occupants gained ingress is a mystery. A man has appeared in Maidan Bradley claiming to be the rightful heir to the dukedom of Somerset. He claims to be Lord St. Maur, who, according" to a tablet in the church, was killed 29 years ago by a bear in India. The claimant explains his absence hy saying that he was taken prisoner by the Russians. Mexico has tho most luxurious railways in the world. The rails of the Mexican Gulf Railway are laid on sleepers of mahogany, and the bridges are built of white marble. On the west coast of Mexico there is another line, which has sleepers of ebony and ballast of silver ore, drawn from the old mines beside the track: -

A novel shaving record has been established by a Hungarian ' barber. He made a bet of 100 florins that he would on a railway journey of twenby-nine minutes, from Pistyan to Neustadb, shave fifteen men without cutting them. The bet was more than won, for he actually shaved three more than the stipulated number. A doctor in the Midlands recently performed successful surgical operations for snoring. Stroking a sleeper's face with the fingers will, ib is said, stop snoring. In West Africa, before a girl is married, she is placed in charge of an old woman who cures her of snoring by closing her mouth* In Cincinnatti University young ladies are taught to " sleep elegantly." Two women had a violenb quarrel at) Gennevilliers, near Paris. Words led to blows, and a fierce conflict was in progress when the thirteen-year-old daughter of one of them, thinking her mother was in danger, snatched up a large gimlet and plunged ib into the other's cheat. The lungs .were penetrated, and the woman died almost immediately. The child was arrested. _ In Southern Germany for some years pasb oil has been produced from the beech nub. The beech nub contains bub 2277 per cent, of oil, bub when the nuts are plentiful, the ease with which they can be gathered, the facb that there is no other expense except the pressing, and the good prices that have been received for the oil have made the production of the oil very profitable. Twenty-three thousand seven hundred feet is the greatest mountain height to which man has ever ascended. A gentleman named Graham climbed as high as this in the Himalayas about ten years ago. The most noticeable effect of this extreme altitude was that the beating of his heart became so violent that ib could be heard, while its rate was very much increased.

A club for bed-ridden invalids has been formed in Chicago. It is called the "Stayabed" Club, but is not, as its name would suggest, a club of lazy people. It is an organisation composed of the bed-ridden. The qualifications for membership are con-, firmed invalidism and the ability to communicate with the other members by letter. Each member writes something each day, and the letters are in constant! circulation....;-.*■ In the museum at Cape Town is shown an old-fashioned, high-backed wooden chair, to which attaches a weird story. It is related that the chair is the one in which the Dutch Governor de Noorde was found sitting dead a few moments after the execution ol a soldier whom he had sentenced to be hanged, and who on life doom being pronounced solemnly called upon his condemnor .to accompany him to the Throne of the Supreme Judge. A theory has been advanced by Tesla, the electrician, that since images are recognised in the brain through the medium of the retina and the optic nerve, it may be possible for the brain to evolve an image upon the retina by a sort of reflex action when the mental picture is formed in the mind, and that possibly means may ab some time be obtained by which this image upon the retina may be recognised so thab true mind-reading may be effected. On the 50th anniversary of telegraphy in the United States, recently celebrated in New York, it was stated that there are now ; in the world about 2,000,000 miles of tele- ; graph wire in operation, and in addition to the telegraph lines there were nearly 150,000 miles of nautical cables over which the Morse system is used. Prominence was likewise given to the fact that the Newspaper Press Association now transmit! in a year nearly 1,800,000,000 words in supplying the public with news. v The already large collection of mummies at the British Museum has just been en« riched by the addition to its number of the embalmed remains of a priestess of Amen Ka, discovered at Deral Bahari. On the outside covering is a representation of the sun god Horus, the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, and the solar discs in "and . red colours. The mummy itself is encased': n what is known as a oartonage, laced ; up at the back after the XXlst Dynasty. Tbt iage of the mummy is about 1100 B.C. '