HEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11644, 4 May 1901, Page 1 (Supplement)

HEWS IN BRIEF.

Tiik colonies of Britain are 97 times he* own size. Wassail is really " wa?s hael," meaning " to your health. Twenty-eight cases of plague in Glasgow. cost the" city £800,000. ' Rats avoid a house wherein a guinea-pr» is permitted to roam at will.. Our army costs £6,300,000 to pay, and £6,500,000't0 feed per annum. Four hundred and fifty London schools accommodate 550,C00 children. The average rent of a Spanish bull-ring is £1310. There are S3 in all. London has: 16.265 cabs and 'buses, and 29,276 men licensed to drive them. In South America there is a race of cata which does not know how to mew. Shetland's herring catch for 1900 was a record—334,COO crans, value £550,000. The average cost of accident insurance is os per cent. : that of lire. Is 6d per cent. To be perfectly proportioned, a man bin uld weigh 281b for every fool of his height. The streets of Paris are swept even- morn* ing by 2600 male and 600 female scavengers. Ireland had-251 people to the square mile in 1841. This number has now fallen to 14-1. One hundred and ninety-four shins are annually burnt at sea ; 183 are, sunk by collision. London's 336 theatres and places of public entertainment will accommodate 400,000 people. The present Pope. Leo. XIII., is the sixth of the century, and the 257 th from the beginning. America's total exports last year were 252 millions sterling, against Britain's 203 millions. England's consumption of paper is 131b a head, that- of Russia and of Turkey lib a head only. The deepest bog in Britain is at Tregaron, in Cardiganshire. The peat is 20ft to 25ft thick. Of 12,000 million letters annually written' and posted, 8000 million are written in. tne English language. The income of Great Britain's biggest trades union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, is £450,000. London sweeps up 50,000 tons of refuse a week. Half a ton a year for each inhabitant is the usual average. The Pacific Ocean covers 78,000.000 square miles, the Atlantic 25,000,000, the Mediterranean 1,000,000. The world has now 170,000 miles of cable ami 662.000 of land graph wires, costing in all 112 million sterling. Last year churchmen subscribed for all church purposes £7,770,992, being £306,553 in excess of the preceding year. An outbreak of enteric fever at Rochester and Chatham is attributed to the people eating raw and partly-cooked cockles. The Mayoress of Bethnal Green (Mrs. Loughlin) lias been returned unopposed as a member of the local Board of Guardians. Forty-three Popes have belonged to the Order 'of St. Benedict, 10 to that of St. Francis, and 4 to that of St. Dominic. To display a crest on stationery and plate in England costs each family a tax of a guinea a year. About 40,000 people pay it. Berlin has a service of dinner-carts which call tit the homes of the working men and collect lunches to convey to the men at the factories. According to Nilsson, the zoologist, the weight of the Greenland whale is 100 tons, or 224,0001b, or equal to that of 88 elephants or 440 bears. Patrick Birmingham, a Romau Catholic priest, was remanded at Wrexham on a charge of entering St. Mark's Rectory and stealing £20. The United States turned out a total oi 2196 locomotives last year. Four hundred and eighty of these were exported, 130 to British colonies. In 1794 the habitual users of the English language did not number more than 30,000,000; in 1897 their number was estimated at 110,000,000. More men have died and are buried in the Isthmus of Panama, along the line of the proposed canal, than on any equal amount of territory in the world. There are annually killed in Africa a minimum of 65,090 elephants, yielding the production of a quantity of raw ivory, the selling price of which is £850,000. The censorship is a very real thing in China. There, anyone who writes an objectionable book is punished with 100 blows of the heavy bamboo and banished for life. Charcoal is the great Italian fuel, Naples alone consuming 40,000 tons of wood-char-coal, at a cost of from £4 to £5 per ton, the national consumption being 700,000 tons. The busiest time on the Atlantic cable is between the hours of 10 and 12 in the forenoon. During that time, on an average, about 900 messages pass over the cables each way. Messrs. A. Rodger and Co., shipbuilders, of Port Glasgow, have contracted to build a larg? four-masted steel sailing-ship for the Anglo-American Oil Company, of New York. The income tax in India is levied on all incomes of £33 and upwards, and then only one man in 700 comes within scope of the tax. This gives some idea of the poverty of India. The death-rate of the world is 67 and the birth-rate 70 a minute, and this seemingly light percentage of gain is sufficient to give a net increase in population each year of 1,200,000. The Kaiser has sent a. subscription of £500 to the Max Midler memorial fund. During the nineties the Emperor regularly sent the professor a telegram of congratulation on the victory of the Oxford crew. The common potato, when decomposing, gives light enough to read by—a. light so vivid that once a cellar at Strasburg was thought to be on fire when shining with the phosphorescence of decomposing potatoes. The total income of the various Protestant missionary societies in Great Britain and America for last year reached £2,600,137. These societies had 11.659 missionaries, male and female, in the mission field, assisted by 64,290 native helpers. Earthenware sleepers, the invention of a Japanese, were recently experimented on in Japan. Fairly good results were obtained. It is claimed that the increased cost of earthenware sleepers is amply compensated by their freedom from decay. A grain-laden sailing ship, the Kilmore, of Glasgow, has arrived at Queenstown from Astoria, being the first of four vesicals departing a;; the same time, whose captains pooled 200 dollars for the first arrival. The home distance is 15,000 miles. Several books in the late Queen's library (presentation copies and so forth) are to be distributed to public libraries, and a catalogue is now being made with that end in view. Of course, the rare first editions and other valuable books are to be kept. There are 1,000,005 blind people in the world, or one to every 1500 inhabitants. In England there are 23,000 blind persons, or 870 for each million inhabitants. In Russia and Egypt the blind constitute the largest proportionate number of the population. There is a small estate in the New Forest which has descended in unbroken succession from father to son for nearly eight centuries. The family is that of Purkiss, the burner » who P'&ed UP the body of King William Rufus, and carried it in his humble cart to Winchester to receive the last rites. The post office has lost none of its attractiveness to young women in search of employment. At the last examination for women clerkships in connection with that department, no fewer than 473 presented themselves to the examiners; and yet only 30 vacancies had been announced for. competi-. tion.. - /