One Thing and Another.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 931, 3 January 1890, Page 6

One Thing and Another.

Berlin has 160 miles of horse railway. The population of Berlin has reached 1,500,000. American wild turkeys have been successfully acclimatised upon the Danube. As high as $25 was paid for a seat to hear Mr Gladstone’s speech at. Southport. In future every troop of British cavalry will be equipped with a machine gun. The Brussels Board of Trade has resolved to hold a Belgian Exhibition in London. A Roman aquednet has been late.y cleaned and put in order at Sahelies, Spain, and now supplies the town with water. _ Queen Victoria’s pet dog is a Yorkshire terrier that weiahs_ two and three quarter pounds and cost $75. Cases of drunkenness among children in Berlin are becoming very common. Peking, China, is to be lighted with incandescent electric lights furnished by an American company. . . The Peking Gazette asserts that 1900 of its editors have been beheaded. The journal in question claims to have been in existence for a thousand years. . In the recent autumn manoeuvres in Lermany the fortifying of an entrenched position with barbed wire fencing was found to l e very efficacious. • 4 ‘ A curiosity of In ian trade is the vast number of umbrellas; imported in»o the country. Last year a total of 2,621,/54 arrived in Calcutta alone. A plague of monkeys afflicts Tanjore, in Southern India. The oreatures do so much misohief that an official monkey-catcher receives a rupee for each monkey captuied. The telegraph business of the Brit'sh

Post office earned a profit last year of about $430,000 —an average of 9 mills on each message sent, or of more than 5 J per cent on the total receipts. The increase in ship.building in England during the past year has been enormous, and on September 30th there were 521 vessels under construction, or 121 more than in ISSB at the same period. A French manufacturing firm has brought out a new fabric made of the fibre of ramie, and called ramie linen, that is said to combine the qualities of linen and silk, with double tbe strength of linen. - - Extralite, the new explosive, to judge by its effects, is extra heavy in the scale of destructive energies. An ammonical salt, a hydro-carbon and chlorate of potash are what make it. A correspondent from Zanzibar, Africa, reports,the race between a zebra and an ostrich as a new feature of oriental sport. Iu spite of the latter’s winning by several metres, the judges awarded the prize to the rider of the zebra upon his protest that the biped had made unlawful use of his wings, The results of English researches in Assyria tbe past year are said to be exceedingly valuable. Almost the whole of Sennacherib’s great palace at Konyunjik has now been cleaned out, including the library and chambers. and the result is that some seventeen hundred new tablets, etc, have been secured for the British Museum.