MISCELLANEOUS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 3764, 28 February 1874, Page 6 (Supplement)

MISCELLANEOUS.

There are 30 Unions and 190 parishes in London. The Belfast flax-spinners are now working short tinle. Some land in the centre of Glasgow was sold recently at .£ls per square yard! Mr Whistler, famous for bis "Symphonies." is painting a porbrait of Mr Carlyle. The Pretender to the throne of Morocco bears the appropriate name of Ben Sliman. Mr Cardvvell has again been compelled to reduce the standard for recruits by half au inch. Three dozen collier lads were fined 10s Gd each at Nottingham the other day for going on strike. A new pulpit, said to be "exceedingly ornate," has been erected in Peterborough Cathedral. At Jarrow, near South Shields, a deaf and dumb woman, named M'Nichol, has been roasted to death. More than £5,000,000 worth of foreign bacon was imported into Britain during the last financial year. The widow of Tom Sayers was lately sent to gaol for a fortnight, for neglecting to send her children to school. Some pearls from the. fisheries on the north-western coast of Australia, have been sold by auction in London at high prices. During the month of November, 92,122 fishes, weighing twenty-nine tons, were seized at Billingsgate as being unfit for human food. Sir James Colquhoun, of Luss, and four attendants, were drowned in Loch Lomond on December 18th by the upsetting of a boat. The authorship of the Pope's last Encyclical ii attributed to Father Curci, the favourite preacher of the Catholic ladies of Rnme. Daring a, storm at Glasgow, en December 10th, the wind blew a gate against a boy's head with such violence, as to kill him on the spot. The estimated cost, according to the ac cepted design, of the public aquarium and baths to be constructed at Hastings, is £60,000. The value of this season's rose crop in the district of Adrianople is put down at £70,000. The crop is grown for the manufacture of otto or attar of roses. The Illustrated London Ncw3 says Sir William Bovill's estate has been sworn under £70,000, and that of Mr George Crawshay under half a million. At an inquest held at Dublin on the body of a soldier who died suddenly, it was stated that he had drunk in the forenoon a pint of rum and three quarts of porter. Two immense steamers have recently been launched on the Clyde, the one being 4200, and the other 4SOO tons, register. The latter is said to be, next to the Great Eastern, the largest merchant vessel in the world. It is intended for the Liverpool and

The horses purchased in Paris for eating fetch a market price of £5 or £6. This new trade increases the value of used-up hor e3, not diseased, by more than £4 sterling : so ■that the public we.ilth of Prance is increased by about 16 raillion.3 by the admission of horse-flesh into the public dietary.

At the Manchester winter James Wooda.ll wits convicted of attempting to destroy by fire hu premises at Preston, with intent to defraud an insurance company. Sentence of penal servitude for five years was passed upon him. According to advices from St. Petersburg, the Russian Government has under consideration a railway project for a direct route through Siberia to the principal-Chinese and Japanese harbours. The line will be 7000 versts in length, and is estimated to coat 300,000,000 roubles.

A medical journal draws attention to the construction of German cigars, which aro described as "even worse than the cigars sold in this country." In the German cigar's arc to be found bristles, hair, wood, bits of linen, leather, needles, shirt-buttons, teeth, feathers, cord, and matches.

Professor Owen has juat discovered in tho London clay at Sheppey a new fossil bird with teeth somewhat resembling those in the Australian hooded lizard. He concludes it to have been web-footed and a fish eater. No evidence of true teeth had previously been known in any bird.

Sir John Bennett, the well known watchmaker of Cheapside, London, stated at Hastings, while delivering a lecture on Switzerland and the trades in which the Swiss were chiefly employed, that they manufactured for England alone watches and clocks to the value of a million sterling annually. He siid that 20,000 females were employed in delicate parts of the work, and that he could not get this done in England at all. A New York paper says that a gentleman of that city recently addressed a letter to "Her Majesty Queen Victoria, London, England," asking for her autograph. He.received the 'ollowihg reply:—"Sir Thomas Biddulph begs to return the enclosed photograph to Mr - — , and to inform him in reply to his circular that the Queen's autograph is never given away.—Buckingham Palaco, London, 27th October, 1873."

Speaking at a Conservative banquet reaently, a Rev. A. Read, of Hyde, declared that Mr Bright had once called the working classes "the residuum—the dregs of popula tion." Mr Bright's attention being drawn to this,, he says Mr Read is a "slanderous clergyman who must know (if he is not very ignorant) that his statement is false." Mr Bright thinks the man's congregation should pray for their minister. Mr E. Chappell, the well-known music publisher, writes to a London paper saying that the truth is that English managers expected rather to be paid than to pay for producing a new opera, and this was fully established in the very case of " Faust;" as, after having vainly endeavoured during two years to persuade Mr Gyo and Mr Harrison to give that opera at Covent Garden, I had at last to pay Mr Mapleson jEIJK) to produce it at Hor Majesty's Theatre. Such was its marketable value then.

A French periodical states that the sale of artificial eyes in Paris amounts to four hundred a week. The principal place of salo is a handsome saloon, where the man-servant has but one eyo, and the customers wishing to buy first judge of t*ic effect of the arti ficial eye by placing it in the man's empty socket. The best made eyes command a high price ; but we are informed that poor folk can bo fitted with second-hand eyes on what is called "reasonable terms." The demand for artificial eyes is much greater than would commonly be supposed, and lai-ge numbers are exported to India, and even to the Sandwich Islands.

Professor Bain, in his recently published work, "Mind and Body," says :—"The memory rises and falls with the bodily condition ; being vigorous in our fresh moments, and feeble when we are fatigued or exhavisted. It is related^by Sir Henry Holland that on one occasion he descended, on tho same day, two deep mines in the Hartz mountains, retnaining some hours in each. In the second mine he was so exhausted with inanition and fatigue that his memory utterly failed him ; he oould not recollect a single word of German, The power came back after taking food and wine. Old age notoriously impairs the memory in ninety-uinQ men out of a hundred," ■

In a loading article the Times says : — " Forty years ago the number of persona apprehended [in London] as drunkards in the course of a year was 41,000; it is now 33,000 ; and whereaß when the population of London was a million and a half the number of persons annually arrested for offences of various kinds was 72,000, the number now arrested, when the population has risen to four millions, is only 78,000."