NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13485, 11 May 1907, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The Canadian Pacific Railway Las 7434 miles of lines. '-■;■■, The average nightly receipts of London theatres are nearly £8000. ■ London possesses 10,244 public-houses, 319 music halls, and 65 theatres. In the United States only one building in three thousand is even nominally fireproof. London's annual dish of meat is 400,000 tons, and the fish course weighs over 200,000 ton*. A squirrel always comes down a tree head foremost, and clings to the bark with it* hind legs. ' ' . Londoners own 4024 motor-cars, this number providing, roughly, one car to every 1100 people. ■"■ Between 500 and 1000 American and Canadian schoolteachers are to visit- England in the autumn. Steamers to tiro'. number of 4116 pass through the Suez Canal yearly. Of these 2484 are British. There are still used on Swedish railways locomotives built in England in 1856 and tho two following yearsTaximeter cabdrivers in London have been christened " bluebottles" by drivers of horse cabs and omnibuses. No fewer than 16 articles of the last Hague Convention •■relate.- entirely to the treatment of prisoners of war. Saturday is the favourite day, for murder, and the worst hours for this worst of crimes are from ten p.m. to midnight. The principal causes of murder are these, in the order in which they stand: Jealousy, drink, quarrels, revenge, robbery. ; Few have any idea of how much of London's 77,496 acres is water. 2051 is • river, 627 foreshore, and 855 lakes and ponds. ; When a witness at Stratford Police Court was told ,to take the book in his light hand ho said, "I can't, I'm left-handed. Up to 1906 Cambridge had won four out of the last five boat races. From 1890 to 1898 Oxford won nine times in succession. , The wild raspberry is said to have the greatest vitality of any English seed., Melon seed has been known to grow after keeping for 40 years. . - The only cotton-spinning mill in Ireland was burned to the ground in Belfast re- . cently. The owners are the Springfield Spinning 'Company. _ The rope-making machine used. in the United States navy yard follows almost the precise linos; that a spider does when making his own frail cable. When a Presidential election ' takes place in the United States, the rival candidates' proclamations have to be printed in :no fewer than 12 different languages. ; The 'Persian Constitution gives a vote to all men between the ages of 30 and 70 who can read and write, and have never • been convicted of any offence against the - law. ' ;. '-/.■;/"' 4 ' i •':' ■ At the university sports, held, in Loudon on March 22, four events were won ,by Rhodes scholars. Oxford won by the great- - . est number of points ever scored—B£ points 1 to I*. . ''■','..'" ■ After testing 289 different kinds of seeds, '. the curator of the Oxford Botanic Gardens came to the conclusion that very few-retain-; '■ ed their germinating power for more than eighty years, _ . i < • The Basuto chief Mothethi Lctsie (are- " ; lative of the late Lerothodi), who killed an elder brother during a quarrel in| 1891, has been liberated after ; J serving 16 years as a convict at Capetown.' ;..:: : \.; . — The Great Walsingham (Norfolk) Board of ■■ Guardians'has: accepted the tender of a local baker, who quoted bread at one penny > per pound, and flour, "so much as the house should require for nothing." ■ ' It is estimated that the new harbour ; works at Dover, which were to have, been ' finished this year, will not be completed for. r ; : another two years. " About £3,000,000 has ■ already been 'spent on. the work. , '~ London gets 161 rainy '* days out of ,the 1 '365, but , yet rejoices 'in 1420 sunny hours in the course of the year. If all the rain lav where it fell, London would be two feet under water by the end of the year. . The Forehoe (Norfolk) Board : ' of - Guardians ; has discovered < that two old v couples who received 14 pints of milk weekly {kept. six cats.: The board decided to request that the number of cats should bo reduced. . 1 Some very interesting historical papers connected with Sandwich have ; been ,£«■»-. sented to the corporation by Mr. J. Jacobs. They include one of Queen Elizabeth's permite to strangers to reside in that town. ".. Russia is : the only ' European country which: succeeds in. governing itself at the rate of less than £2 a head of her population. The average in thej United Kingdom, ; France, and Austria exceeds £3 per head. * A Johannesburg inventor is exhibiting the model of a flying-machine described as the " airmobile." >.;.. It is of simple construetion, and the maker claims that his invention will travel at the rate of over 100 miles an hour. i Very recently a billiard match was played ..-.; in Paris, which lasted for 24 hours continuously. The match took place between Jules Cohen and Pierre Jaussaud, and altogether : they ; walked about 30 miles ; during the game. Ten years ago the total immigration into Canada from the. Mother Country was 0n1y..'./, 14,406. Last year it had reached, 97,133; of whom 17,672 were Scots; ; and '). 3797 Irish. The numbers are expected to exceed 100,000 this year. -. ' * A Metric System Bill was introduced into the House of Commons in March, but was '.';, defeated. The mover of the Bill; caused : amusement by stating he presented a petition in favour of the metric system: signed . by " 16,600 odd people." Hundreds of cats were stolen from their homes at Delaware, Ohio, as the result of a bogus announcement, distributed by Ohio* University students, that Professor; Mar-' shall would pay 4s a-piece for the first 25 cats presented at his office. . ,' [ , It is usually supposed that Belgium, with her 589 persons to the square mile, is the most crowded country in Europe. ■ But this is not the case. The Hanse Towns district of Germany boasts the amazing population of 3327 persons to the square mile. '_..'", A party of peasants clearing away the snow from a hut on Mount Bresovits (Servia) heard a faint call from within."lt came from a boy who had taken refuge there with his:' father 40 days previously during a terrific storm. The father had died.', ' ■ The ingenuity of. a South Norfolk (Connecticut) workman in tying a small bell found the neck of a rat and then liberating it has completely freed the Automatic Machine Company's factory cof an army of these pests. The noise of the tinkling bell frightened them away. t At a representation of Schiller's "Don Carlos" in Belgrade Theatre, the pistol with which Don Carlos should have shot the Marquis dePosa refused to go off, and the discomfited actors fled behind the curtain. Offers of loaded weapons were at once made by several members of the audience. A tramp recently asked for admittance to Zemlin Hospital, announcing his death for the same evening at seven o'clock, and that of the Emperor of Austria for March 28, The doctor's examination revealed no ;' sign of disease, but the tramp died, nevertheless, at the hour he had foretold. A man who was charged with drunkenness at Kingston went twice to the police station demanding that he should be locked up. He explained his action to the Bench thus: "I- went to the police station to see the old place. I hadn't been there for a few years." He was ordered to pay ss. The house in which Daniel Defoe wrote "Robinson" is doomed to demolition. This '-.'• is the old manor house standing back from '■■'. ! the road opposite Tooting Junction and surI rounded by an old-world garden. The house is seldom" visited by English people, but . many Americans alight to inspect it on their : way to view Mertoa and what is left there .relating to Nelson.