NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3831, 14 August 1928, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

A lifeboat costs £7O per annum to maintain. Five is the great sacred Chinese number. Nearly 3000 miles of canals in use in England. The rays of the sun take 84 minutes to reach the earth. Finger-nails grow at the rate of rather more than 14in. a year. Hearing, as a rule, is more acute with the right ear than with the left. Lake Baikal, in Siberia, is 4,500 ft. and over four-fifths of a mile deep. A mounted specimen of the great auk’s egg was sold in 1905 for £4OO. Shrove Tuesday was formerly a great day for the sport of cockfighting. It is estimated that there are 55,000,000 square miles on the planet of Mars. Angling was indulged in by the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. <?'The food and drink consumed by the average man each year weighs about a ton. Private persons who own and fly aeroplanes in Britain now number 70 or over. An Indian spider’s web only six inches in width was found to contain over 41,50.0 meshes. In the Wieliczka salt mines at Moscow there are altars, shrines and statues made of salt. The first perambulator was built in 1780 for a daughter of the fifth Duke of Devonshire. The total consumption of tobacco averages 21 lb per year for every inhabitant in the world. The most expensive chair in the world belongs to the Rome. Of solid silver, it cost £IB,OOO. During the first year of the war, nearly 1000 French guns were blown up by imperfect fuses. Last year £220,000 was collected for charities in the streets of London, £13,790 less than in 1926. Lake Victoria, in Africa, the second largest fresh water lake in the world, is almost circular in shape. Travellers reaching Palestine recently from Trans, jordania reported passing through five miles of locusts. An album, containing about 500 photographs of anarchists, was published by the French Governments in 1894. ' The highest inhabited place in the world is the Buddhist monastry of Ilaine, in! Tibet. It is 17,000 ft. above sea-level. Milk contains 874 per cent, of watfer, while cauliflowers contain 904 per cent,, cabbages 894 per cc-nt,, and tomatoes 914 per cent. Seaweed found on the shores s ’of Orkney contains a certain chemical which, combined with coal-dust, makes a very successful fuel. Losses due to road competition suffered by the Southern railway in England, is estimated at between £400,000 and £500,000 a year. Lord Henry Bcntinck, M.P., has presented to Nottingham Castle a picture by an invalided soldier Avho was a Nottinghamshire miner before the war.

Telegraphs in Uganda are not always reliable, as the natives covet and often cut down the copper wire for making into bracelets, necklaces, and leg-bands. If a lingo cistern, large enough to cover Trafalgar Square and as high as Nelson’s Column, were built as a watertank, London would empty it twice a day. “Cat” is now adjudged too difficult to spell for New York schoolchildren under nine years of age. They will be limited to “at,” “if,” “as,” and such words. The oldest love-letter in the world is in the British museum. It is a proposal of marriage for |be band of an Egyptian princess, and is in the form of an inscribed brick.

Two women policemen control the traffic at the busiest spots in Constantinople, the authorities of that city considering women better fitted to handle traffic “jams.” Palle fluid, the Danish boy scout who undertook to go round the world in 44 days, completed bis journey according to programme, half of it being muter the British flag. Mr. Isaac Chambers, aged 50, a bailiff, of Gibraltar Farm, Chatham, was recently killed by gun-shot, a lamb bumping against the gun, it is believed, causing it to discharge. A gigantic hand made of glass and illuminated by electric means, opposite tlie Munich railway station, draws the attention of tourists to the variou s interests of the town.

Coin and bullion worth about ,£161,000,000 was recently moved from the old to the new vaults just completed in connection with the rebuilding of the Bank of England. At one of the largest pheasant farms in England, on the borders .of Sussex, and Hampshire, 5000 hen pheasants are kept in captivity, and at least 150,000 eggs are sold every year. The number of marriages celebrated in Manchester during Whit week, this year, is one of the lowest on record. Unemployment and the housing difficulty arc thought to be the cause. According to a recent census of passengers on a road outside Brighton, 71.2 per cent, were travelling in private cars, and on motor-cy-.cles, 14.4 by char-a-banc, and 9.7 'per cent, by omnibus.

A cake with 80 candles and a speech of 80 words graced the parity given by Slough’s oldest magistrate, Mr. Samuel Osborn, of Datchet, to 80 old neighbours to celebrate his 80th birthday.

The lantern-fly of Surinam, South America, has two sets of eyes, so as to catch the light from all directions. Its light is like that of the ordinary fire-fly, but it is much more brilliant.

The pike is believed to live longer than any other species of fish. A Swiss naturalist has recorded the history of one that was 207 years old. It had spent its entire existence as a prisoner in a fish pond. A pair of 4d deep blue Cape of Good Hope stamps, 1861, were sold for £3BO at Harmer’s Old Bond St., a few weeks ago. The stamps are only lightly post-marked. Only one or two other pairs are known. A calf, placing its head between a wheel and the body of a gun, a war trophy, at Holbeach, Lincolnshire, became firmly wedged. Five, hours elapsed before the animal was released, little the worse for its experience. Mrs. Sarah Middleton, the oldest woman inhabitant of Hythe, Kent, who was buried recently, boasted that during her ninety-eight years she never had a doctor or medicine until her health failed six weeks before her death.

Thimbles were formerly made only of iron and brass, but in comparatively late years they have been made of gold, silver, steel, horn, ivory, and even glass and pearl. In China beautiful carved pearl thimbles are seen bound with gold, and with the end of gold. At an inquest at Christow, Devon, on Ernest Wills, aged 30, a quarryman who was killed through a piece of rock weighing 2cwt. falling' on him, it was stated that Wills married the widow of his brother, who met his death three years ago at the same quarry in similar circumstances. Hugh Moore, aged 19, a resident of Kimbolton, who was found lying unconscious on the roadside, near Feilding on Tuesday evening, and brought to Palmerston North Public Hospital suffering from head injuries, died on Thursday without having regained consciousness. Tt appears that deceased was thrown off his motor cycle, which skidded in loose gravel. A distressing accident resulting in the death of an infant occurred at Glenham on Thursday, when Johan Sheila McDonald, aged 12 months, a daughter of Charles McDonald, Glenham, fell from her pram and was accidently strangled, reports an Invercargill Press Association message. Mrs. McDonald found the child half out of the pram, caught by her dress, which was wound so tightly around the child’s neck that' although it was at once removed, the child was already dead.