NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10133, 16 May 1896, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

■ —» The Patent Office has issued 7633 patents for laundry appliances. Windsor Castle has been used as a royal residence for 785 years. • In the Prussian army the rate of suicidal deaths is 65 per 100,000. In Great Britain last year nearly 11,000 pips succumbed to swine fever. A of steel pens formerly coat £7, To-day they can be had for 4. The Forth Bridge is capable of sustaining the weight of two ironclads slung from the centre.

The coloured people of the United States maintain seven colleges, 17 academies, and 50-higb schools. The inventor of the baby incubator, or, as the New York World calls it, "the tin mother," has died recently in the Par West,

A new hitching device, by which fireengine horses are harnessed by one move of a fireman's "hand, is being tried in San Francisco.

French strike statistics for 1895 show 391 strikes and 54.576 strikers, as compared with 634 strikes and 170,123 strikers in the previous year. The highest score in an international football match was made by England versus Ireland, at Belfast, in .1881. It was 1? goals to none. South America now contains a population of some 35,000,000 souls, and these people obtain the great bulk of their manufactured goods from Europe. Once a year the Emperor of China ploughs a furrow in order to dignify agriculture in the eyes of his people. The ceremony is invested with great pomp. As speaking tubes are found not to work on the English warships, owing to the rattling of the machinery, the Admiralty have determined to try telephones. Mr. Rowland Ward, of Piccadilly, has purchased and presented to the Zoological Gardens a fine male lion, the animal that killed its keeper some few weeks since at the Agricultural Hall. The meat costly piece of railway line in the world is that between the Mansion House and Aldgate stations in London, which required the expenditure of clos< upon £2,€00,000 a mile. Mr. Henry Tate has givon £5000 to Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute for Nurses, which provides the poor with nurses in their own homes, and also a pension fund for the nurses.

According to Galton, the patterns on the finger' tips are not only unchangeable through life, bub the chance of the finger, prints of two persons being alike is less than one in 64,000,000,000.

At an inquest on George Brooks, a steeplejack, who fatally fell while fixing a lightning conductor at the Board School, Atley Road, Bow, the jury returned a verdicb of " Accidental death."

The revenues ot the Duchy of Cornwall, which the Prince of Wales receives, are nearly £70,000 a year. The Queen receives the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster, which are over £40,000 yearly. In bidding for the new first-class cruisers for the British Navy there was put 1 pel cent, difference between the bids of the three competing firms. About £430,00(1 will be paid for each 11,000-ton vessel. In Stepniak's last book he stated thai Russia stands third among nations in the number of books published, surpassing Great Britain. As but little fiction is printed, the enormous output of serious literature is the more remarkable. During the recent war amenities between England and Germany the London Shipping Exchange sent .the following telegram to the German Emperor: "No need to send 5000 Germans from your country j we can most readily spare them from here.'" At least six women are honorary colonels in the German army. These are the Empress, the Dowager Empress Frederick, the Queen of the Netherlands, Princess Frederick Charles, the Duchess of Connaught, and our own Queen Victoria. . Of the seventy thousand breweries in the world, thirty thousand -aW'ih "Germany, Great Britain has eighteen thousand, and the United States five thousand. Each country uses nearly all its own product, except Germany, which manufactures more than it consumes.

Captain Roborovsky, with the Russian expedition to Thibet, has returned to Russian territory. The expedition surveyed a route of 10,700 miles, determined the position of 30 points by astronomical observations, and brought back many thousands of natural history specimens. Memorials to the Home Secretary are being signed in Cardiff in favour of the appointment of a female doctor at the local gaol, in addition to the usual medical officer. The movement is being vigorously pressed forward by Miss Harlbatt, Principal of Aberdare Hall, and other local ladies. In Hawesville, Kentucky, according to a local journal, a curious tree is to be seen, It produce! each year a crop of walnuts and mulberries. " Once upon a time a mulberry seed fell where a walnut lay, and the sprouts came up side by side, uniting their forces into a solid trunk." The bark of the tree is that of the walnut on oneside and that of the mulberry on the other. The Secretary for War has directed that, should the exigencies of the service permit, facilities will be given for Jewish soldiers to observe the following festivals Passover, March 29th and 30th and April 4th and sth ; Pentecost, May 18th and 19th ; New Year, September Bth and 9th : Day of Atonement, September 17th; and Tabernacles, September 22nd and 23rd and 29th and 30th. During the journey south of the President of the French Republic he took the opportunity at Laroche to pin the Cross of the Legion of Honour on tlw breast of an old man, M. Baillod, who is 103 years old and one of the two.survivors of the Grand Armee. Curious to relate, after having fought at Waterloo, the centenarian was discharged from the army as consumptive.

Canon Gore, in a recent 'sermon in St. Paul's, London, explained that shorthand was a well-known art in ■ the New Testament times, and that shorthand writers formed then, as now, a distinct profession. The speech of St, Stephen was undoubtedly a shorthand report, and it exhibited the marks of hurry which such a report must naturally show. Probably not one in ten of Mr. Gore's hearers had any idea that shorthand was an accomplishment of the first oentury. *

The English Poab Office has achieved another success in . the deciphering of strangely addressed letters. The Rev. W. E. Clarke, a missionary, who was one of Robert Louis Stevenson's friends in Samoa, has been lecturing in Blackburn, and has received a letter from his native congregation addressed "la Misi Talati, o 100 i Peritania." The postal authorities discovered that this is Samoan for "To Mr, Clarke, who is in England," and the rest was easy.

A slight conception of the extent of the British Empire may be obtained from this; the fastest liner afloat; would occupy a longer time in traversing the space covered either by the length or by the breadth of the Indian Empire than it does at present to cross the Atlantic. Yet, after eliminating India, England's possessions in Australia and North America alone are sufficiently largo to make four and a-half more Indian Empires, still leaving territory enough to cover the area of Great Britain and Ireland five times over. Services in a Kentucky church were lately broken up in an extraordinary way.. As the preacher was warming,up to the climax of fervour, a little black-and-white animal, with a bushy tail, sped up the aisle, pursued by a big yellow dog, ' The creature leaped upon the ; platform, ', where, the preacher's boot automatically; repelled it with a vigorous kick, which landed it in the midst of crowded pews. : It was a polecat or skunk, and expressed; its 'resentment in a way that stampeded the congregation as hastily as an alarm of Sre. According . to, the Athenaum, which quotes the newsi from Continental papers, the Portuguese Government has decided, at the. suggestion of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, on celebrating'iu 1897.. the 400 th anniversary of Vasco da Gatna'e expedition for the discovery of a southern passage to India. That memorable expedition, which was fitted out by Manuel the Fortunate with four vessels manned by 160. men, started in 1497 on July ..Si and it is Intended to open on that to next . year : en -. exhibition In connection ;tti* *• ; W°«a