NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19215, 2 January 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Japan has no poisonous.reptiles and few wild animals.

There aro now moro than 120,000 Jews settled in Palestine.

There are now nearly 16,000 motor-cars in the Philippine Islands. Montreal, the biggest Canadian city, now has more than a million people. Miss Jane Baby, of Bath, kept her 106 th birthday a few weeks ago. America consumes more petrol in eight hours than China does in a year.

Three cottages and half an acre of land were sold for £BO in Bedfordshire.

Four pennies and a halfpenny have been found in a builock m Lincolnshire.

A mother and son recently graduated together from an American high school.

Polaris, or the Polo Star, is reckoned to bo about 44 light years away from the earth.

Alderman Tirnms. of Dunstable, is the first platelayer m England to be elected mayor.

A pure white English sparrow lias been presented to the Saskatchewan Museum in Canada.

A lady in a London bus the other day found among her change a Queen Anno sixpence.

A Packham man has grown l'l his garden a sunflower 10ft. high with a bloom a foot across.

In Great Britain last year 24,000 tons of sugar were produced from 22,000 acres of beet.

Roy, the famous dog .-it Euston Station, has died of old age after collecting .f.3100 for railway charities.

Tho treadmill is said to bo the invention of the Chinese and used first for the purposo of raising water. Tho sea fish landed in Great Britain during the first nine months of last year weighed 12,892,116 tons. A potato with a waist of 17in. and weighing over two pounds has been dug up in a Yorkshire garden.

The Rev. Christopher Cook, rector of Mamhilad, near Pontypocl, has resigned after 70 years. He is 101. Somo young Welsh coal miners havo formed a class to study Greek, the only class of its kind in Europe.

A Lincolnshire couplo having married for 62 years, the church bell was chimed for them 62 times.

So that they may bo visible at night, level-crossing gates in Italy aro to bo painted with luminous paint. A girl of nine has given 78 farthings, her savings for a year, to tie Royal Chest Hospital, City Road, London.

A dealer in scrap metal has bought a captured German gun from the Cleethorpes Town Council for £7. Stoke-on-Trent guardians have forbidden children from their institutions to take situations in public-houses. Six officials of tho State Butter Trust, havo been condemned to death in Russia for selling butter to private traders. A British firm is to build a new steel railway bridge 2000 ft. long across a branch of tho Nile near Alexandria.

dotting into tho organ' of a parish church in Buckinghamshire, a white cat stopped tho organ during a service.

A young bittern, blown out to sea id a storm, arrived exhausted on tho liner Olympic 600 inilea from New York.

Tho Mauretanis, carried two million, pounds worth of gold for America when she sailed from Southampton recently. Knocked down by a motor-car, a little Lincolnshire boy exclaimed, "I havo lost my penny!" Tho motorist gavo him. £L A Toronto man operated on after 20 years of blindness excitedly exclaimed "I can see," and died in four hours from tho shock.

The Swedish University of Upsala has presented to the British Museum 275 rare works on natural history written bstwean 1697 and 1875.

Sir Charles Markham provides free half-a-pint o.f milk each morning for the scholars attending the village school at Longford, Derbyshire. Forty boats were sunk 1 and a thousand lives lost in the great storm in the Persian Gulf, which is said to have been the worst in living memory. In a sort of race to earth five parachute jumpers recently leaped simul-' taneously from a balloon at an altitude of 3000 ft. All were unhurt. The Pope has delivered a thousand speeches since the beginning of Holy Year, and they are to be published in book form by the Vatican. A rat got into the transformer of an electric power-house at Peterborough and stopped three brickworks for hours, yet escaped after losing its tail. During the pulling down of an old house near Bergamo, in Italy, a human skull filled with gold and silver coins was found hidden in a hollow wall. At -vicactly the same timo as an Eastbourne boy was thrown from his bicycle hia twin brother was injured in another part of the town through a fall. Freshly-fallen snow weighs from five to twelve pounds a cubic loot; but if tint snow is wet owing to rain it may weigh from 151b. to 501b. a cubic foot. Hundreds of people cheered a Reading man who was lowered over the River Kennet with a rope round his waist and rescued a cat under a factory bridge. During the Canadian election campaign a platform gave way under a Liberal •speaker, and he was, of course, immediately accused of "standing on a poor platform." Two cows whose calves had been taken from them broke out of their field two clays later, and walked through the night till they found their babies 13 miles away. Last year the Port of London Authority seized and destroyed nearly 3000 tons of unsound food, mostly sugar sweepings and grain, and killed over 42,000 rats.

Spain is raising a fund to ni}y from a descendant of Columbus the heirlooms of the great seaman and his original correspondence. The price asked for these treasures is £34,000. Experience is said to be proving that stammering is,, a mental disorder, to bo cared by any treatment that will restore the child's self-confidence and remove the fear of stammering that is the chief cause. The custom of wearing wigs in of great antiquity. They were worn among the Egyptians as a royal and official headdress, and they were used by both men and women of Greece, Rome and Carthage.

The British and Australians are the teadrinking people of the nations and the other great branch of the Anglo-Saxon race, the whites of tho United States, are at the head of the world's coffee drinkers. Brain stimulation by sunlight exposure is very marked, according to Sir Henry Gauvain. A group of children receiving sunlight treatment in a London hospital showed great superiority in mental tests over a group not being given sunlight treatment.

Fishponds need renewing by fertilisers, like farm lands, according to Dr. H. Fischer, of tho University of Munich. In his experiments, phosphate fertilisers seemed to be required more than potash salts, and had the greater effect- m increasing the production of fish. The new great hall at Cologne Dome, hung over one year ago, has just been rung for the first time in peal with tn® other bells. It was cast to replace t&« " Kaiser Bell," which was cut tip during the war as a spectacular sacrifice, ostensibly for tho manufacture of munitions.