NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14888, 13 January 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The wannest place in Europe is said* to be Malaga.:,. "•'v'- • ■ . ' ;

Last year 967,490,000 letters were posted in London.. ' - •

One hundred tons of coal, when burned, produce a ton of soot.

. The population of Italy on June 10th" amounted to 34,686,653.

In California farmers often plough »$ furrow six miles,in length. The pigmy mouse of Siberia is4he-.smail* est quadruped in the world.

Through a misprint, a fourpenny stamp issued in India in 1854 is now worth £70.

In 1908 the number of registry office marriages in London was 9690. For 1909 the figures were 8689. Judgment has been given by the Supreme Court at Leipzig in a lawsuit which commenced in 1511. ; H A little girl patient in a Berlin hospital, who had an eyelid torn off in an accident, has had it successfully sewn on again. Mexy, a three-year-old dog belonging to Dr. B. H. Grosser, of Chicago, has had nine teeth extracted and gold ones .■ substituted. .

In the twelve months, ending June 30th last 10,936 persons were'killed and 150,159 injured on the railways in the United. States.

About two hundred bunches cl mistletoe, some of abnormal size, are growing upon the trees in Hampton Court gardens and park. " ' ■;"' ' >-' ' >'^

Seeing its reflection in a plate-glass window in High-street, Kettering, Northampi tonshire, an escaped bullock charged the window and shattered it. ' In Norway there is no tresspass in the British sense, and woods, plains, mountains, lakes and dales are the common, pro* perty of tramp and tourist alike.

At an inquest on a van guard who was*; killed by the explosion of an empty petrol | barrel, a witness said that empty: petrol barrels were much more liable to explode than full ones. A Russian girl, aged sixteen, whoaa the Central Immigration Board admitted, said;; that she had come;. ( to London to rejoin ' her mother, from whom she had been parted for fifteen years. * Over £271 has been subscribed by the post office <officials; for the f f ; London memorial to King Edward, the donors direct* ing that it shall be allocated to the. proposal park, at Shad well. A man in Ujvidek, Hungary, who was arrested on a charge of ' bigamy, pleaded • that he and his first wife had been separated so many years that he had quite forgotten that he was married. • •.'-',' Last November 4599 rats were destroyed in chips and warehouses in the docks of the ' Port of London. , This makes a total of 688,457 exterminated since the work was first undertaken ten years ago. . Of 42,560 people who left the United' Kingdom in October, 26,955 went to British < possessions and 15,605 to foreign countries. The passengers from Ireland to the United States numbered 5906. , Australia has cows enough to give each' man, woman, and child the island continent three a-piece; while the Argentine- •■ can do even betterthere are five cattle, to each inhabitant in the big South Amelia can Republic. A taxi-cab accident in ..Edinburgh haa closed . the - eventful ; career ;of ; William Coutts. who ,was.one- the crew of the Lady Franklin, which in 1850 left Aber-; deen to search for • Sir John Franklin in the Arctic regions., M, Jules Louis Bouget, of Paris,;.haa . bequeathed a legacy of £4000 to be divided i between any two ; girls in the Seine dis- . 'trict ■ considered *by the : prefect to be most; deserving, 'on condition that they are mar* lied before "April, 1912. ' The latest application of the X-rays 45.! , to dentistry. The secrets of the teeth— whether they are decayed or healthy,' or whether they have been properly attended ; to—all are : revealed by X-ray photographs \- which can now bo taken by dental surgeons. '. 7 Telephone subscribers., in Hamburg will in future be able to regulate. their clonks by means of signals sent out from the ob- ; servatory. Anyone who wants to put his clock or watch right will have merely to ring up the exchange and ask for the,time signals to be switched on. ; Three years ago a lady farmer near Meld sold a pony to her son, who resides some twenty-five miles-away between IRhaddlan and Rhyl. \ The pony has for . the third time found its way back to its former home, managing to , unfasten' two gates in order to do so. As many as two thousand rag-pickers find employment about the , streets of New York. They ■ are mostly Italians, who have displaced the Irish arid Germans, who used to do the work.' Their ? gatherings of rags' are' valued at £150,000 a year. The hand-cart dealers do a fcnsx-* ness of £600,000 a year. An astounding incident happened at Portland lately, when the chef of a big club cut into a sheep's carcass and £130 in currency coins fell to the floor. ; A telephone call to the market from which .the mutton \ had been received revealed the fact that a clerk had placed the money, inside the carcass for safe keeping teg banking hours. , Two remarkable cures are reported irons the l London Orthopaedic Hospital,; both-of; • girls, aged eighteen and;twenty-one respectively. The former ha sbecn crippled . since birth and the latter since the age of two and neither has been able to walk at Hi, all for eighteen years. : : After soma months* ! treatment at the hospital both patients are now able to walk alone. It is not generally known that Mr. Bali '.. foUr is one of the cleverest farmers of the \ day. An adjustable feeding-trough for young animals in use at Whittingehame is* Mr. Balfour's own invention, and *> rabbit-trap which captures the animals mercifully 13 another of his inventions. This latter he is said to have made when a small boy of nine. The Earl of Leicester is a Sub-port* master with a salary of £25 a year. Hisj office, which transacts the ordinary business, including money orders and telegrams, is attached to Hoikham Hall, , ■ Wells, . Norfolk, and the Earl, , who . ia\ under the supervision of the • postmaster Fakenham, lias to render the usual returns and sign for his quarterly salary ex* :!-' the official form in general use. , .o. . . . At Aix-la-Chapelle, Oscar . Forkenbeck" collected a file of ten thousand newspapers. Some years ago he hit on the excellent' ■ idea of founding a newspaper museum, and, with this object in viww, sent a circular round, asking the newspaper world [to assist him in his great work. The con- ; i tinental * press seem;, to : have responded with enthusiasm, and now there is no ■ ; greater collection of i newspapers existing. j An American consular/report states that j in Tacohow ... a correspondent saw 'some strange industries. One was the keeping of large stags, as big as a fair sized horse, r reared for the sake of their, horns, which«!: are cut off every summer and sold for, !&4\i much as £7 for use as medicine., ' The horn is soft, and the softer it is when re-"■';' moved the higher tire price realised. The $j other was ' the raising of the machi; a sort f | of large pheasant, the tail feathers of which are very valuable, as they r»»3 needed for the dress hats of mandarins. Many years , back 1 the . then King ,of Prussia visited a needle manufactory ia his kingdom. He was own a number of superfine . needles, thousands of which j together did not weigh half an ounce, and marvelled how such minute objects, could 'bo pierced with an, eye.,," But he was shown something oven finer. The workman whose business it was to bore the *y«. • in. the needles asked for a hair from ;..tbfl.£& monarch's head., It was reaody , given,.'..'?; and, with a wile, the borer . placed it under his machine and made m eye in it.. , This he furnished with a thread, and then..; i.l handed t the ; singular needle to tha m,vs , tad** Si* . • ;l-5:.^