GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18996, 18 April 1925, Page 3 (Supplement)

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

PARIS AND ITS VEHICLES. .Mure than half a million vehicles of various kinds are circulating throughout the streets of Paris. Theao include 11,387 taxi-cabs, 1283 mot or-buses, 2610 traincars, 32.14 horse and motor vans, 2000 ordinary animal-drawn vehicles, and 50,000 ].t ri vat ely-o wtied cars Nearly 400,000 bicycles go to make up another factor of some importance in the heavy traffic which passes daily through the streets of the French capital. INDIANS IN AMERICA. The Indian population of the United States to-day is believed to be as large us it was when Columbus discovered America, according to reports of the Department of the .Interior, The figures show a total of 346,962, counting all tribes, representing an increase of 2610 in the fiscal year ended last. June, and a gain of 16,283 on the last It months. Oklahoma leads in Indian population, and New \oric contains the largest number of red men in the hast. HAIRLESS WORLD PREDICTED. " Baldness is undoubtedly on toe increase, and if unchecked will result, in n race of hairless people," said Mr. If. J. Harper-Roberts lately at the London College of Physiology. Only among civilised people, said Or. Ilarper Koberts, was baldness more pronounced in cities than among the peasantry. Feverish illness or poisoning of tlui system, the blood-pressure, and lowering condition of the patient brought about baldness. (Smoking, was another cause, ' RIVAL CLAIMS TO BABY. Two rival claimants to a baby figured in a dispute at the Greenwich Police Court recently. The mother, who had handed over the child, when six weeks old. to an aunt, now asked for ait order for the return of the child. Saying she had cared for the child for three years, the aunt refused to hand it over. " It is not a question of goods or chattels; there are no pioeeeoings here foi unlawful possession of a baby," observed the magistrate, who told the mother she would have to take the case to the High Court. AN OLD SKY-SCRAPER. Wail Street's oldest sky-scraper, the, famous 10 storey Mills building, is shortly; to be giv.en over to the housebreakers. It was erected 40 years ago on wooden piles, and was then considered a remarkable engineering feat. As tha piles proved insufficient to carry its weight, engineers drove in additional supports after trie completion of the building. For many years the building was used by Mr. J. P. Morgan's bunk, but the lease lias now been transferred by Mr. Morgan to the Equitable Trust Company, which proposes to build a 34-storev building costing over £2,000,000. TEE FIRST WIRELESS MESSAGES. A record has been discovered of alleged wireless telegraphy as long ago as 1662. In that year a book by P. de l'Ancre was published, in which the author reported that a man had demonstrated to King Henry of Germany u means of communicating with absent persons. The inventor rubbed two needles against a magnet, and attached them to different clocks. As an operator turned the needle on one clock dial the needle on the other made the same movement, regardless of the distances which separated the clocks. King Henry, it is stated, forbade the publication of any announcement of the invention ! A RACE WITH DEATH. r 'ne of the flying boats on the Imperial Airways Ser». en Southampton ii Guernsey was lately requisitioned to Convey a specialist to a serious case on the isl-uid of Jeisey, practically a race with death I lie living-boat, a big Rolls-Royce super-marine, was lying in Guersney Harbour ready to fly back, when an urgent message was received asking for a specialist to be flown to Jersey. Dr. Clayton_ Reid was informed, and at once embarked on the living-boat, and by its aid was at the bedside of his patient within an hour of the message being received. BAD NEWS FOR TYPISTS. Professor A. M. Low stated in London recently that he. is working on the invention of a machine which will be a combination of dictaphone and typewriter, and not the least of its uses, he declared (playfully, of course), would be the doing away with the "intermediate muddle of a girl." The idea of Professor Low is to have a machine which will not only receive dictation, but will transcribe the words on paper as well. But he foresees difficulties in tho case of so many words meaning totally different things, though sounded exactly alike. Then, again, practically everybody, he said, spoke the same words in an entirely different manner. HOUSES AT £250 EACH. Mr. T. 11. Nash, chairman of St, Paul's Cray (Kent) Parish Council, has devised a scheme for the construction, of houses of the bungalow type at a cost of £250 each, capable of being built by unskilled labour in two or three weeks. The houses are constructed of concrete blocks, which possess on the outside surface density to withstand the weather, and on the inside porosity. Material for the ,manufacture of the Mocks can, Mr. Nash savs, be obtained in abundance bv screening the refuse dumps of any district. At a. conference held at Sidcup, attended by local M.P.'s. municipal representatives and others, Mr. Nash stated that he estimated that 1000 such bungalows could be erected for £250 each. WHERE IS O? Colne sounds a fairly distinctive name for a town, vet- there are ten of them in England. There are fourteen Burtons, and thirty-seven Burtons with additions. There are twenty-three Prnstons, and thirty-eight others plus something. The, name of .Jericho occurs six times on the Ordnance maps; Paradise, occurs five times, and Nineveh, Mount Zioti, Mount Ararat, and Mount Eplirairu three times each. Names which consist of a single letter are nrtt. uncommon. France has a river and Sweden a town named A. There is a river Y in Holland, and one of the bays of the Znyder Zee bears the same name. Two Chinese towns are named Y and U respectively, while in Normandy there is one named 0. ENGLISH TOWN'S WINDFALL. Property in Leytonstoue, which in 1637 only yielded £2O per annum has, in the. course of vears, enormously increased in value, and has brought an annual windfall to the market town of Bourne, in South Lincolnshire, to which parish the property was left. The estate was in Chancery for 150 years, and when Bourne benefited in 1837 the estate had an annual value of £420. The income for 1924 was £3850, due to developments in Greater London. About £2OOO a year is distributed in pensions to tho poor, while a tenth of the yearly income is devoted to education purposes. The trustees are now awaiting tho decision of the. Charity Commissioners to increase the number of pensioners who benefit under tho charity, as they have an increased income of £l5O for the current year.

" LEARNED BARBER " OF BATH. Mr. A. W. Loekver, hairdresser, of Bath, known familiarly to customers as " Dad," ' and in the district as the " learned barber," has died at the age of 73. I Mr. Loekver was well versed iu the I classics, and his knowledge of Dickens and Shakespeare was intimate. He often astonished his customers with the aptness of his quotations in discussing cm rent events. TOMBS OF DISTANT TIMES. Tho world's oldest stone buildings are reported to have been discovered near tho famous pyramids of Sakkara, about 15 miles south of Cairo. They are two Royal tomb chapels of the thiul Egyptian dynasty, about. 4000 B.C. Built in a style differing in almost every respect from what is known as Egyptian architecture, the chapels are believed to have been the burial places of princesses or queens. Fragments ot gravestones of J'oyal princesses are said to have been found by archaeologists who have been digging on the sue. MYSTERY OF THE SAHARA. Specimens of fish that swim beneath the sand of the Sahara Desert are being exhibited at tho American Museum of Natural History. They were taken from subterranean desert water-pools, and are not of rare species, as might have been expected. One kind is a member of tho minnow family. Others resemble porch. The presence of these fish in the desert remains a mystery. One theory is that the eggs are transported there in particles of mud, or weeds, carried in the claws of birds that visit the desert water holes. A BOY WHO MADE GOOD. A donation of £SOOO has been made to • the Newark Hospital by a man who left the district a poor lad, but who has returned rich. Mr. Harry Coulby, of Cleveland U.S.A., . lived at C'iaypole, five miles from Newark. and worked on the railway there, i lie went to America as a youth, obtained work with a shipping company, and now owns a shipping line on the Great Lake as well as other enterprises. The gift is conditional on Claypole residents being admitted for treatment. He has already made many gifts to his native village, the most recent being a village ' hall. \ 150 A-SIDE ECOTBALL. Football with the goals—only 4ft, wide r-a quarter of a mile apart, with 150 players on each side, was played at Alnwick, Northumberland, on February 24. There the Shrove Tuesday football match between the parishes of St. Michael's and St. Paul's has been played from time immemorial. Great crowds lined the "pitch" to see St. Paul's win by the only goal scored. , Then came the wild scramble for possession of the ball. It was driven into tho River Aln by the crowd and retrieved by Lewis Proudlock, who plunged through the water to the far bank to secure his trophy. CATHEDRAL CLOCK DAMAGED. When the new clock which is to adorn the interior of Westminster Cathedral, London, was being raised into position beneath the organ loft, the hoisting gear went wrong, with the result that the massive timepiece crashed to the stone floor. A man standing in the vicinity of the mishap had a narrow escape from death. Tho clock, built ot a cost, of £SOO, is about three feet in diameter, and owing to the accident the works have been thrown completely out of adjustment. The lower edge of the !>olid oak casing is i badly damaged, but, curiously, the glass , covering the dial remains intact. BANK-NOTE SECRETS. Greater privacy surrounds the making of notes for the" Bank of England than almost any other undertaking connected 1 with that great institution. The paper on which the notes are printed has been made in the same factory, at Laverstoke, Hampshire, for over two hundred years. It is prepared entirely by hand from specially selected rags, and is washed and re washed- in spring water used for no other purpose. The formula of the ink used in printing the notes is known to only half-a-dozen poople. The chief ingredient is charcoal obtained by smoke-drying the wood of Rhenish vines. The average period of circulation is two and a-half months. About 60,000 of the notes are printed daily, while every year nearly 20.000.000 old notes are destroyed. EGYPT'S MONSTER PYRAMID. The Great Pyramid of Egypt was erected more than 5000 years ago. and nothing more mechanically perfect has ever been built. In massiveness of construction it far exceeds anything that any other nation, ancient or modern, has ever attempted. Its original height was just over 480 ft, and the length of each side at the base 764 ft. Its cubical contents exceeded 809.000,000 cubic feet, and the weight of its mass 6,840,000 tons. Its original ■ cubical contents would have built a city 1 of 22,000 houses, with walls a foot thick, ■ each ' possessing 20ft of fi outage. If the contents of this vast structure • were laid down in a line a foot in breadth • and depth, the line would be nearly . 17.000 miles in length. Herodotus states • that 100.000 men were engaged in its const ruction for twenty years. CHIPS OF OLD CATHEDRAL. | A stone of Canterbury Cathedral, the - "Mother Church of the Anglican conimnnitv," is to be built into the structure of the cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. " as a link between the two great churches of the Old and the New World. The offer of a stone recently made by I)r. Bel), the Dean of Canterbury, has 1 been accepted by Bishop Manning, of New York, as "a symbol of our fellowI ship with tb- See" of Canterbury and with the Church of England." 1 Dr. Bell stated the other day that the ! stone to-be sent to New York would he a - loose one belonging to the older part of ' the cathedral, probably one of the monastic buildings. "A number of these ' loose stones," said Dr. Bell, "have been ' incorporated in the structure of cathedrals in England, and in at least one in America—that of Washington. STORY OF A PENNY. There are several interesting things about a penny. The figure of Britannia which appears upon it, is actually that of the famous —or infamous—Frances Stew- ' art. afterwards Duchess of Richmond, one i of the most beautiful of the many lovely i women of the scandalous Court of Charles 11. 1 i Surely no woman was ever so immortals ised, or. had so many replicas of her graceful figure reproduced. She has in > her hand a trident, liic weapon Neptune ' is supposed to carry, but in her case its three prongs stand for Faith, Hope and i Charity. Her helmet is the " helmet of Salvation." .spoken of by St. Paul, and i her shield, which bears a cross, is the ' " shield of faith.'' i The head of King George on the reverse ; side looks to tho left, but'if one looks at i an Edward penny'it will be seen thrX i tho head looks to the right. Victoria, ! like her grandson, looks to the left. ft ■ is usual to reverse the faces with each succeeding reign.