NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11872, 25 January 1902, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

A single -workman, can cut 6000 watch* , ; glasses a day. . . v s iSjQ In the Rock of Gibraltar there are sairenty - miles of tunnels. . i - v,! Over a million patients pass through London hospitals every year. ,Three ;i thousand marriages are performed , every day all over the world. The entire horse-power of British steam engines is 15,100,000, equal to Germany and " France combined. Parcel post began in 1880; four million' parcels were carried. In the next, nine years i '•••* 131 million were carried. * VJ Spain lias more sunshine than any country in Europe. The yearly average is 3000j hours; in England it is 1400. 1 Down to the time of Columbus wheat, averaged 28s a ton in price. This has risen, to a present average of £13 ss. • Germany, holds the record for the first • ' daily paper. , It was printed in 1524. Our; first did not come out until 1622. Russiau railways are the most dangerous in the world. Thirty persons in every mil-; lion passengers are either killed or hurt. The average rental of holdings under 50 acres in England is; £5 16s an acre; that of estates over 500 acres is but 36s an aero. The . King has fixed February 13 as the date of the world's figure skating champion-' ship in London, which His Majesty will at- * V.«\ * tend. ' An ordinary locomotive of 300 horsepower burns one ton. of coal , for pulling a ! goods train 40 miles 6r a passenger-train 80 miles. The daily circulation of newspapers in the United Kingdom' rose from 60,000 copies in 1801 to 700,000 in 1850, and now reaches . • 8,500,000.

Owing to the decrease of prisoners the gaols at Enniskillen, Mullingar, Omagh,, ' '"l\Z Wicklow, Drogheda, and Carrickshannon, have been closed. ,* pf On the equator the average temperature! - of the ocean surface is 78 degrees; but at. 500 fathoms the water is only five degrees; above freezing-point. j - In a Bohemian mine, 4600 ft deep, the temperature stands at 120 decrees. In the deepest English mine, the Rosebudge, it is | 94 degrees, at 2500 ft. Great Britain grows 3,560,000 bushels of | ■ :! k potatoes a year on 560,000 acres. Ireland, j -,v|| to grow almost exactly the same amount,,' requires 800,000 acres. • • i"l\ Thirty-five thousand ostriches are annually plucked at the Cape. They yield 260,000 pounds weight of feathers, worth one million and forty thousand pounds. The Congo is one of the widest waterways in the globe, if not the finest. It is twentyfive miles across in parts, so that vessels may pass one another and yet be out of sight. The rare 1807 edition of Byron's " Poems on Various Occasions," with three original ' t |Ji verses in the author's handwriting, was sold ' for £129 at Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge's. For seuding tuberculous beef to the Cen- . tral London Market/Samuel Style, farmer, of Crockford Bridge Farm, Addlestone, near Chertsey, was at Guildhall fined £25, with £3 3s costs. ' A Transatlantic steamer carrying ' what is v.'

called " a full mail;" usually carries 200,000 1 letters and 300 sacks of newspapers for 'Lou- , don, to say nothing of the 500 and odd sacks • for other places. A gold - weighing . jnaehiee in theBank of England .is 1 '" so'. sensitive .that *a, postage stamp') J dropped ' on, 1 c the scale'will turn the index on the dial a,.; " " distance of six inches. . ~- v ./ .Ay, -5 An enterprising wine and spirit firm has engaged an aeronaut to give a series of balloon ascensions in Ceylon, and while ascending to drop small, sample bottles of whisky,'* ~ J . r . s attached to miniature parachutes. The evolutionary stanzas of "In Me- ■ moriam" were written before Robert Cham-, - ; bers'," Vestiges of Creation" was published, and long before Darwin, Huxley,-and other r " apostles of evolution had begun to sound the ;; trumpet.Acadcmy. Mr. Langdon, electrical i engineer of'the Midland railway, says that by the use of k* J electricity 3,000,000 tons of coal would be , * saved yearly,' and on the Midland - system ' \ alone £364,000 per annum would be the saving by the suppression of steam. It has been ascertained by experiments ' n , \ that persons who use the telephone habit ' ally hear better with the left ear than with, the right. The common practice of the telephone companies js to place the telephone so that it will be applied to the left ear. . A little church in Reading, Pennsylvania, " was entirely Built v by the pastor, who is ■, •• » sixty years'old. He made the excavations,, • ' ' put" in the foundations, erected'■ the ; walls, did the plastering, painting, tiu work, etc., ■; a.iul paid out of his own pocket all the >. - money for materials—about £200. . ; ....;■ Important proposals for . adopting the Gothenburg system were made public by . Bailie Chisholm, at Dalkeith. It is proposed to acquire various licensed premises in Dalkeith, which town is considered one of the best in Scotland in which to try the. v " Gothenburg experiments on an extensive scaie.' Referring to Lord Rosslyn's possible visits ''■ to Monte Carlo a correspondent writes that |. - a similar attempt was made by Lord Gree- - ' nock and three friends in 1883. For forty consecutive days they won a thousand francs per diem. They then bought p. safe, and that very night they lost fifty thousand francs. / If Numbers of -experiments have been made to test the speed and destination of corked bottles thrown into the sea in various parts of t.he world. The most remarkable ex- i ample we ever heard of was that in which a • bottle travelled 6000 miles in about two , ' years and a-half—roughly, at the rate of 6i miles a day. It travelled from 63deg. south „ latitude and 60deg. west longitude to *■ Western Australia. In the picturesque village of Allesley, Warwickshire, an ancient custom, which is ' ' t found to linger-'here and there, is still observed. The church bell is rung at five o'clock every morning in the summer and at six o'clock in the winter, in order to arouse sleeping villagers and enable them to start work in good time. The curfew bell is also ' tolled at eight o'clock each evening. A cup of hot coffee is an unfailing barometer, if you allow a lump of sugar to drop to the bottom of the cup and watch the air - - bubbles arise without disturbing the coffee. If the bubbles collect in the middle the weather will be fine; if they adhere to the cup, forming a ring, it will either rain or snow; and if bubbles separate without assuming any fixed position : changeable weather may be expected. ... ■ In the famous cellars of the Hotel de Villu . ■. te Bremen there are a do?:«n cases of holy wine which have been preserved for 250 ; years. If the cost of maintaining the cellar, " •> payment of rent, interest upon the original ~ value of the wine, and other incidental 'charges are considered, a bottle of • this choice wine has cost £400,000. each glassful £54,000, and a single drop could not be sold ,•. without loss under £40. Mr. H. B. Passage moved recently in the ■ Indiana House of Representatives that the »x, method of executing criminals be changed from hanging to the administration of morphine : The motion was tabled. The .idea ... of execution Iby : poison is not ,of course;: a ■■ >1 novel one. The method was m common use - / in antiquity,, and ,various agents were used. The most 'famous instance was that of - the death of Socrates by hemlock. gg| ||§gg| The Ipswich Museum of the best in i f jfcl the Eastern Counties — acquired the walking-stick - used by the . late; Mr. Gilbert , -' v -' [ White, of Selborne, made from a fishing-rod used by the great naturalist. White gave * V it to' Bernard . Barton, the Suffolk Quaker poet, who, in turn/gave it to Edward Fitzgerald, his neighbour at Boulgo Hall. £ " Old£ Fitz" passed it on *to Mr. Fred Spalding, of Colchester, who has now sent it to its lnanent home.