NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Mail, 20 August 1902, Page 16

NEWS IN BRIEF.

A man of 70 has eaten in his lifetime about 68} tons of food. (Several pure white bantams have arrived at the London Zoo from Japan. Berlin, Berne and Rome are to be connected by telephone. The Greek Church employs two rings in the marriage ceremony, one gold, tinother silver. The oldest Royal dynasty in the world is that of Japan, which goes hack unbroken for 2000 years. It is noted that nail-biters are the poorest. students. Tiie habit prevails most frequently between the ages of 12 and 14.

Two pounds a quart was paid for 1893 Marcobrunner and Grafenberger at a recent sale of Rhenish wines in Germany. Tho Prussian prayer bock enjoins that the whole of the service, icluding the sermon, shall not take up more than an hour.

Tho world’s ships carry 185,000,090 tons of merchandise a year, and of this one-quarter, by weight, is coal, and onetenth wheat.

An enormous block of granite was recently removed from a quarry in Cornwall. It was 55ft by 20ft by 20ft, and weighed about 2043 tons. la Siberia, if a man is dissatisfied with tho most Rifling acts of his wife, he tears a cap or veil from her face, and that constitutes a divorce.

Vaxsilissa Ivanovna, an old peasant woman, now living at St. Petersburg, is 117 years old. She was a married woman when Napoleon invaded Russia.

The will of the iate Miss Mary Ann Defoe (of Croydon, England), tin* last descendant of the author of “Robinson Crusoe,” has been proved at £7OB.

A Roman bowl of Samian make, said to he 2000 years old, lias been brought up from tho soa bottom off Peachy. Hca -1 by a Brightlingset cyster dredger. An engine capable of developing a speed of 30 miles an hour in 30 seconds is being constructed by the Great Eastern Railway for their suburban traffic.

What, is claimed to he the largest iron cable in the world is now being made at Lebanon, Connecticut. It is to be mo-rc than a mile long, each - link weighing 931 b.

The Rev. John Spurgeon, the father cf tho late Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon, the famous preacher, died in June at Norwood, England, in his ninety-second year.

Because she found fault with his work and reported him to the headmaster, a French schoolmistress lies been stabbed to death by a 12-year-o-ld schoolboy at Batoum.

Tiie biggest clock ever made bv one man lias just been finished in Chicago. It is 18ft high and 15ft square. It .shows tho evolutions and movements of the planets of the solar system. Three-tenths of the earnings of a Belgian convict arc given to him on tho expiration of his term of - imprisonment. Some of them thus save more money in gaol than they have ever saved before.

The firm of Goldschmidt, of Essen, in Germany, are very successfully treating from 50 tons to 60 tons daily of old sardine tins by an electrolytic process, and thus recovering the tin and the iron.

“I greatly regret to inform my friends,” a good old farmer announces in a Hungarian paper, “that owing to intervening obstacles the birthday of my beloved wife will not take place this year.”

Mr Borchgrevinck, the Well-known Antarctic explorer, who lias returned to Now York from Martinique, says that he has obtained data which will enable scientists to foretell volcanio eruptions. Four murderers were executed by garroting in the Spanish fashion at Porto Rico on June 3. As the United States authorities could find no on# eke. the executioner was a convicted murderer, who received his freedom and a gatuity of .£2O.

For riding in a railway carriage reserved for negroes, and so violating the State “Jim Crow” oar law, Miss Mary Curtis Lee, second daughter of General Lee, the famous Confederate leader, has been fined £1 at Alexandria, Virginia. Eighty pigeons had their eyes picked out recently by an owl which entered their loft by night at Nordhansen, PrusThe same owl tho night before picked out the eyes of a whole litter of kittens which were in the same building.

The Boer loss of independence is a national disaster to Holland; a disaster greater than any that has visited us since 1812, and more deplorable than tho secession of Belgium in 1830 Professor de Louter in “Het Dagblad ” Utrecht. 5

When at Dar-es-Salem (German East Africa) recently Prince Adolph Frederick °r, MediklenbVjgi-Schwerm, the Hutch Prince Consort’s brother, heroically sav-i

ed a party of civilians out boating W ho were drowning. ” 1

We are wont to accuse our cousins of want of business enterprisebut on the commercial side, in matters of society, they are far ahead of Us We have not arrived at regarding tho fashionable world as one into which the stranger can k'D! ki- as he could into a theatre.—“Argonaut,’ 7 Sail Fyijcisco.

me much-debated question as to the authorship of “An Englishwoman’s Love Letters” will shortly be answered once for all. Mr John Murray will publish in September another book by the same author, and this work will be issued under the writer’s own name. i], e book in question is a translation from the old French of “Ancassin. and Nice lete.”

Mr Hawtrey (in “There and Back”)) j s a virtuoso in lyingf Though h e may begin with the common lie, the lie with a purpose, the lie utilitarian, lie soon goes on to embroider it, to execute Paganini-variations on it-, to produce tho lie in “harmonics” and the lie “on one string.” and the lie with a tremolo and the lie pizzicato, till at last all the potentialities of lying are exhausted. It is art for art’s sake. —A.B.W. in the “London Times.”

The new fast train service between Now York and Chicago was inaugurated on June 10th, by tlve New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railways. Hitherto the journey of nearly 1000 miles Ims been performed in 20 hours, but now both trains accomplish it in less than twenty hours. The average speed is 4f) miles an hour, hut during the run both trains frequently travel for short distances at tiie rate of nearly 100 miles an hour.

Old newspapers will shortly be turned into new ones by means of a process which, the inventor says, will save the paper manufacturer something like 55 per cent. At a laboratory in the Borough Herr Knopf, of Munich T’niversity. demonstrated a process by which a printed page can be made into pulp, cleared of the ink, and made again into a sheet of paper almost milk white in colour. The commercial value of the invention is said to be great. A preferential tariff is in truth the’ only means at c.ur disposal of repaying the colonies the obligation under which they have laid us by their behaviour during the war. Canada- wants to send us timber and wheat; Australia, hides and wool. If we can give Canadian timber an advantage over Norwegian, and Canadian corn an advantage over Russian, why should we not? If we wish to give Australia the preference to Argentina in the matter of Ids and wool, who shall say us nay?—“Saturday Review.”