INTERESTING ITEMS.

Northland Age, Volume 3, Issue 20, 18 December 1906, Page 8

INTERESTING ITEMS.

There are in Wales about 910,289 people who speak Welsh, and about 439,000 outside the Principality. * At the opening of the last century only forty-seven translations of the Bible were in existence. To-day there are ninety entire and 230 pertial ones. * The most wonderful temple in the world is built on a rocking stone on the sufnmit of a mountain in Northern India, which is over 20.000 ft. high. The rock weighs many thousands of tons, but is balanced on so fine a point that a comparatively light pressure is sufficient to make it sway. Hindu priests teach their followers that this rock was placed in position by the help of the gods, and thus- they add considerably to the feeling of awe which they desire to create. —* — There is probably in all the world only one town built of glass, and that is to be found near Yellowstone Park, in the United States. The glass is not artificial, but natural, being formed by, ages of volcanic action. It is dark green or black in hue, but in every other resembles the artificial product. Easily cut into slugs and quite impervious to the weather, it makes excellent building material. * There is a species of marine stickleback found in the Black Sea of which both male and female build nests, while the female sits on the eggs something like a hen. The chroinis of the Sea of Galilee also builds nests ; so do the turbot of Mauritius the Jew-fish of Australia, the mudfish of Gambia, the cat-fish of Maine, and the gourami of Java, Borneo, and Sumatra. Some of the sunfish, lampsuckers, and doras have the same domestic instincts. *

There is only one place in the world where the sun sets twice daily, and that is at Leek, in Staffordshire The reason of this is that a jagged mountain is situated to the west of the town, and in the evening the sun sets behind it and darkness comes on Then the first sunset occurs, the gaslainps are lighted, and apparently night has set in. But in the course of an hour or so the sun reappears again through the opening at the side of the mountain and it is daylight again. Artificial lights are extinguished and daylight prevails, until the sun descends bellow the opening and the second sunset occurs and night comes to stay. -

King Edward VII. rules over 400,000,000 subjects, of whom there ran be very few who are unaware of his existence, while to the majority of them his features must be familiar from pictures and otherwise. In addition to these he is known, in one way or another, to the 70,000,000 of English-speaking Americans in the United States, as well as to many foreigners on the Continent and elsewhere, so that, at a very conservative estimate, more than, half of the earth's population know our king. Practically all the best fish-hooks in the world—and nearly so ol all qualities—are made at Redditcli. The annual output is probably 500,000000 hooks —about 10,000,000 per week—ranging in size from enormous and ferocious-looking shark-hooks to the tiniest hooks for very small trout-flies, with a "bend" diameter of about one-sixteenth of an inch, a thousand of which will not more than fill a good-sized thimble. The price varies as much as the size, ranging from a few pence to two or three pounds per thousand. + It is now being asserted that the Japanese are the lost ten tribes of Israel, one person remarking that it was probably inevitable that they should be sought in the Japanese, in view of the fact that the museums of Japan contain numerous engraving* purporting to show the landing of Jews in Nippon. One of the pictures cited is said to show a procession in which the Ark is discernible, and in which the priests wear hats of Biblical pattern, Another depicts Rolomon in the act of receiving gifts from the Queen of Sheba, while —and this is regarded’as most conclusive of all—-the founder of Japan's dynasty of 126 Emperors to’ f the same name ("Osea") as the] ofot King of Israel ("Hoshea ). Mis oontemporaw 11 m ,A. * • \l