MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 1731, 24 January 1885, Page 6

MULTUM IN PARVO.

— A committee has juat been formed to organise an international show of fern die beauty in Paris, competitors in which shall be between the ages o£ twenty and thirty years. The firat prize, it i& said will be a magnificent set of diamonds. The mißcroscope reveals that the^e are mora than 4000 muscles in a caterpillar, arid that tha eye of * fae drone contains 1000 mirrors. There are spiders as small as a grain of sand, *«id toe y sPas Pa a <& r sad so fine that it would require 400 of them to equal the size of a single hai. I*.1 *. , , . -In Nepaul, India, there" iB • «taj» of natives who serve as ' ' saddle men", 3BCI take the place of saddle Horses. Strapped around the waist and fitting into the curve 01 tno bacic is a padded ledge. It is supporteu vertically by shoulder straps, and on it the rider sits.

—The Queen's principal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, has been undergoing a thorough refit at Portsmouth for nearly a year paat. About £50,000 has been expeaded on the Victoria and Albert, and there will probably be a aocopd estimate before she is completed , for her Majesty's use. — There is a rumor in England that when the Princess Imperial of Germany was in England in September, she paved the way for a visit of Prince Bismarck to Sandringham, when he and Mr Gladstone #re to have an opportunity of hobnobbing. 3Jh 6 tusks of the mammoth masfcGion discovered recently by workmen in a marl pit, near Monroe, N.Y., have been saved entire. They measure ei# feet in length by seven and a half inches across the base. Two teeth, each ten incheß long and foar and three-quarter inches in circumference, have been taken out. — According to the census of 1872, the population of Naples was divided into 93,406 families, and these families live in 12,850 houses. Bach family is composed of an 1 average of five members, and each house holds •vn average of Beveii families, or 35 persons. But as the well-to-do like Bpacious acoomPoor dd G Brea8 rea y t «fc> ™°™-> but Naples perhaps ex^^^ oil -A new departure m -Hrfywwlyfor business is spoken of as being n t introduction to the public. It is asso. perfectly sweet oils are being produced, w*. out odour or unpleasant taßte, which will be largely used for medicinal purposes, as tonics, &o. The experiments have been entirely satisfactory, and preparations for producing this oil in large quantities are nearly completed. — With all its splendour Paris is little more than a white sepulchre. A recent writer on the city says that for every 2,000,000 inhabitants there are 151,000 helpless poor. Two hundred and fifty thousand Parisians, roughly classed as blackguards, have no visible means of support. Besides these paupers and criminals, there are 100,000 licensed women of the towa. Of these 35,000 are under eighteen, 7000 ui?der fifteen and 5000 under thirteen years of ags. —The receipts of the great Catholic Missionary Society, the.Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the past ypar amounted to £254,800, p> decrease as compared with the previous year. The great bulk of this income is from France, as in former years. The following shows the receipts in franca by countries : France, 4,215,224 ; Italy, 446,548 ; Germany, 391,226 ; Belgium, 333,212 ; Alsace-Lorraine, 272,949; North America; 177,851 ; England, 151,229 ; Holland, 104,304. — Persons who are color blind are usually either red blind or green blind, and their infirmity is almost always confined to one colour. Cases of violet blindness are rare, and no instance Is known of a person unable to distinguish between blue and yellow. -It is a ] remarkable fact that, while about one man in every 25 is more or less colour blind, the affection seldom occurs among women, only one case having been observed by Dr B Joy Jeffries, iv an examination of 1400 ladies.

—Miss Jennie Casey has been expelled from Emmanuel Baptist ChurclvN.Y., on a charge of slandering the Rev. Samuel Alman, pastor ,<?£ the church. The^young lady circulated the jreppit flbat the pastor had frequently kissed her against Jmv will, but the pastor denied the charge, and tno j»*;ojity of deacons sided with biro. '" ' *"

— An incident unparralleled in the history of railroading occurred on the Missouri road, between Lincoln and Denver. A train of eight cars loaded with coal was blown a hundred miles by a tornado, the speed muah of the the way exceeding a mile a minute. They were overtaken at last by an engine, which coupled on and hauled them back. — The superiority of British over Turkish rule is forcibly illustrated in the island of Cyprus, Though many taxes have been removed and the customs duties are less burdensome, the revenue is increasing. After meeting all tho indispensable outlays for the public service and enlarging the expenditure for education and making various needed improvements, there is a surplus of £80,000 in the treasury. This is only £8000 less than the British are required to pay the Sultan for the use of the island, and it is believed that the revenues will soon furnish the entire sum.

—Manhattan Island iB already like London — " a province covered with houses" — but its population is far more concentrated. While London has but 170,000 persons to the square mile in its moat densely settled districts, New York has 290,000. London has seven inhabi tants per house, but New York has twentyfive. In London there is an average of forty nine people to an acre. In New York there are in certain sections from 300 to 750 persons to the acre. London with less than 4,000,000 people, covers 75,632 acres ; New York, with about one-third of the same population, is confined to 12,570 acres, or one-sixth the area. The English metropolis has 486,236 houses, New York has less than 103,000.

— A fish auction in Holland is one of the oddest things in the world. As soon as a boatman reaches port with a load of fish the fact is announced by the sounding of a gong. Those desiring to make purchases repair to the beaob, where the fish are piled up in little heaps. The owner then proceeds to auction them off. Instead of letting the purchasers do the bidding, as is done in this country, he does it himself. He sings out a price at which he will sell the lot, and comes down by easy stages till within what the purchasers are willing to pay. — There are several species of fiah that have smaller fish within them, thus having to forage for two mouths inslpad of one. The inner fish belong to the eel family, and are so slippery that they pop down the throat of the fish they are going to board with before it can shut its trap. When once down it is safe, besides being Bure of a living, —If all the locomotives in the United States were placed in one line, they would make a line over 200 miles long, worth about 192,000,000 dollars.

—In 1883 Paris ate 9485 horses, 307 asses, and forty mules, or not ehorfc of 5,000,000 pounds weight of horse, ass, and mule moat 1 . The explanation of this increasß is the high price of beef and mutton in the French capital. While the artisan can purchase a horse steak at less than 12 cents a pound, he has to pay three times as much for a cut of beef or mutton. Among the hippophagists of Paris the flesh of the asß and the mule is esteemed even more highly than that of the horse, those deli- j cacies fetching a price 15 to 20 per cent, higher than simple horseflesh. — Take an oblong vial of the clearest and whitest glass, and put into it a piece of phosphorus about the size of a pea. Pour some olive oil, healed to the boiling point, upon the phosphorus, fill the vial about one-third full and then cork it tightly. To use the novel light remove ,the cork, allow the air to enter the vial and then recork it. This empty space in the vial will become luminous, and the light obtained is equal to that of a lamp. When ihe light becomes dim its power may be increased ! by taking out the cork and allowing a fresh supply of air to enter the vial. —The Bishop of Peterborough once said that he preached two sermons he could never forget. One was in St. Paul's, when he thought his voice would crack in trying to reach the last tier of chairs ; the other was once preaching to six personages in the Queen's private chapel her Majesty being present. He felt m the latter casa he was among friends, and could not look" oh tso half dozen as a congregation, but he did nok »ue^e the same terrible hole in his manners as a young cjprgyman did under similar circumstances, when &3 forgot that there were others present besides bet Majesty, and broke forth in this wise—" Thus, m&d&tfi. we see how earthly things," &c. He has not preached again before royalty. —-One of the most striking features of modern French life m the rapid increase of insanity, the number of cases x& which, and especially those induced by alcoholism, ijs becoming larger each year. In 1882 there were 1g,434 admissions into the asylums, of which 10,183. were new cases, the total number under treatment m the year being 58,760, of which 27,000 were men &nd 31,000 women, showing that that femalas are the most liable to the disease. Vaccination performed once does not act as a preventative &i small-pox after a certain length of time has elapsed. An examination of the statistics of this disease shows that of £hose who had taken it and had b&eu y^ccj^ated in Msncy, 90 per cent are over JO yeats of age, whita poly 10 per cent are under 10 years age. RevaccLn^on at intervals, say of seven yl&flJ, is the only known effective measure for P-- "* "'4ty of the prinoipa! pitjejp of f* ranee senjfc — i>x. -*. fa A,meriga to vja# the goo&on workmen ou. Exhibition. "'inff Kong, estimates — Bishop Burdon, of .n.. -*«Uftfig iff (China the number of Protestant On»_ "*• 80 rages' at 60,000.- This is the result of somt, *«r work, and the bishop thinks it is not „ couraging. "It is true," he says, " that 20,000 communicants and 60,000 Christians adherents are, after all, but a small proportion of 300,000,000, but considering the nature of the field and the small number of workers (there is not one effective missionary to a million of the population), the ratio of progress during the last 30 years is sufficient to encourage those who believe in religious work at all."

—A recent number of the Pall Mall Gazette contains a very interesting sketch of the advertising methods employed by Messrs A. and F. Pears, manufacturers of Pears' Soap. This firm spends yearly, in oalling public attention to its wares, from £30,000 to £40,000, and is regarded as one of the most extensive as well as one of the most original advertisers in the world. It does an immense business and employs over one thousand hands. The Pears have been manufacturing soap for four generations past, and their great success is due to the energy, persistency and skill with which they have kept their products before the public mind, as well as to the fact that they have produced an article which, when tested, always gave satisfaction and made a patron. The present extensive use of Pears' soap is an ilhistra. tion of what judicious advertising can accomplish. —A painful seen© oocurred recently at an eviction near New Robs, when the wife of the tenant, 80 years of age. was carried on her bed out into the road. Her husband, who is an imbecile, 94 years of age, was also turned out. The furniture was then removed. It is alleged that, notwithstanding a certificate that the old woman was dangerously ill, the landlord's attorney insisted on the eviction being carried out