One Thing and Another.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 889, 15 March 1889, Page 7

One Thing and Another.

Applying kerosene with a rag when you are about to put your stove 3 away for thß summer will prevent them from rusting.

An Italian physician claims to have discovered that the blood of an eel contains a poison of a similar character to the poison of vipers. He says an eel of two kilogrammes has in its blood enough poison to kill six men.

Red wines are mostly produced in the north of Italy and in Sicily on the eastern coast, and white wines in the centre and south of Italy and wes'ern coast of Sicily.

The poet Longfellow speaks of a plant called the white man’s foot. It is the common broad-leaved-plantain, which ia known by the above name among the natives of North America because it is not indigenous but Introduced, and keeps paee invariably with the progress of the white man into the country.

A physician in a contemporary, illustrating the evil custom of talking to an invalid about his pains, says that once he requested a mother to mark a stroke upon a paper each time she asked a sick daughter how she was. The next day, to her incredulous astonishment, she made one hundred and ninestrokes! A three.months’ visit away from home was prescribed. One firm alone in Venice, that of Mr Jesurnum, employs 4000 work people in the manufacturing of 34 different descriptions of lace, embracing some thousands of different patterns at prices from 1 penny to £9O per yard. All the laces are produced by bobbins or by the needle.

The Devil’s-bite is the name given by the Arabs to a plant peculiar to the Holy Land. It is a species of the Scabious, the root of which has the appearance of having had a piece bitten out. The superstitious account for this peculiarity by saying that the devil was resentful because the root was useful as a medicine for man, and in his spite bit a mouthful from it to spoil the root.