NEWS FROM ALL QUARTERS.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLII, Issue 1736, 11 February 1921, Page 6

NEWS FROM ALL QUARTERS.

SHOCKS FROM PEAS, "When plants die they give off a large amount of electricity. If 500 .teas boiling in a pot all died at the ome moment they would give a current sufficient to electrocute the ook,” said Sir .1. C. Bose, in a lecture on growth of plants, to the students of University College, London. Y r ou can deceive a lilac plant with chloroform, ho said. Usually it sleeps iir winter and blossoms in the spring, hut if given a dose of chloroform in winter it blossoms on awaking from the chloroform sleep. _ SHATTERED DOVE DREAM. Harry Levin has sued his wife for divorce in Cleveland, Ohio, on the ground that she misrepresented her age to him when they were married in 1915. At that time she gave her age as 22, he states. Levin’s dream of love was shattered recently, he declared, when he discovered that his wife was 44. The Court of Common Pleas, in Cleveland, will decide whether this is sufficient ground for a divorce. THE VERDUN GRAVEYARD. Many villages in the Verdun region will never be reconstructed, according to Meuse officials, who have decided that the land so badly torn up b‘y shell fire is not fit for further cultivation, and will not be suitable for agriculture for a long time to come, says the “Journal.” In the Somme scores of villages were destroyed, not even a pile of dust, remaining to show where habitations once stood, but at Maurepas, Bouchcvesnes and Combles the ground is being replanted with satisfactory residts, and the villagers are returning there and putting up shacks where formerly their homes stood. But in the Verdun area, where 800,000 men fell, during the war, about half of whom were French, only 10 per cent, of the bodies have been recovered thus fair. Every kilometre of the cratered ground holds thousands of dead, and it will take at leafet fifteen years of work to exhume the bodies of the fallen.