GENERAL INFORMATION.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2644, 28 January 1908, Page 7

GENERAL INFORMATION.

Gloves with separate fingers were unknown before the twelfth century. ! In one summer the descendants of a single fly will number 2,080,320. | Within the last fifty years more than 200,000 miles of cables have j been laid on the bottom of the sea. In Norway every brida must exhibit a certificate that she knows how to cook. Pompey's Pillar, at Alexandria, is 114 ft. high, the shaft being a single stone 90ft. in length. Two-thirds of all the tonnage of all the merchant navies afloat belong to the Amglo-Saxon nations. » The smallest inhabited island in the world is that on which the Eddystone Lighthouse stands. A curious point in Swedish criminal law is that confession is necessary before capital punishment can be carried out. Out of every 1,000 English people, sixty-eight are named Mary, sixtysix William, sixty-two John, and sixty Eliza. The long-stop was not usually dispensed with in first-class cricket until the visit of the Australians to England in 1878. Chimneys were unknown to the ancients, and are not mentioned by any Greek or Roman architect. A hole in the roof let out the smoke. The origin of the supposed ill-luck of a May marriage is traced by some to the fact that Mary Queen of Scots was married to Both well in May. .Painting on a special kind of

spider's web is done by some ladies in Norway, the "picture web" being then framed under glass. Greek and Roman doors always opened outward, and when a man was passing out of a house he knocked on the door, so as not to open it in the face of a passer-by.

Professor W. J. Holland, of the Carnegie museum at Pittsburg, after a thorough examination of prehistoric animals found in a cave near Holicfaysburg, Pennsylvania, United States , announces that the bones were those of an immense bear, unlike any now in existence, and which must have lived 20,000 years ago. The smaller bones found in the cave, and which were supposed to be the offspring of the bear Dr. Holland says are those of the mammoth's young, which the great bear must have captured in a raid upon the mammoth herds. Hitherto, it has been assumed £hat no animal was powerful enough to prey upon the mammoth. Besides these bones, there were in the cave the bones of numerous gigantic squirrels and other animals which are now extinct. Rain falls more frequently between 3 o'clock and 8 o'clock in the morning than at any other time during the day.. 1586.