MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 1814, 27 August 1886, Page 6

MULTUM IN PARVO.

— The beautiful red plumage of a South African species of birds has been chemically examined and found to be due to copper. When the birds are kept from food containing copper they entirely lose the tint produced by that mineral. — It is asserted that Rupert, the future heir to the Bavarian throne, is also the Stuart heir-apparent to the English throne, he being descended from Henrietta Maria, daughter of Charles I. of England. —A Frenchman has found that by placing a few drops of glycerine and water into the corners of the eyes of dead persons their life-like appearance is restored. — According to Mr Soetbeer's researches, jewelry and the arts, after due allowance has been made for the re-employment of old gold, absorb yearly 90,000 kilograms of pure gold, or about £12,000,000. — Women sometimes attain a great age in Russia. A Mdlle Soanitzki died in the work- I bouse at St. Petersburg the other day at the age of 122 years. In the same institution another woman, named Irene Nicolaieff, reached age of 110 years. — Dr E. Parmly Brown declares that the excessive use of salt is one of the main factors in the destruction of human teeth. — The Lutheran Church in Wisconsin outnumbers all other Protestant churches combined, having upward of 90,000 communicants. — The court jeweller of the Vatican is at work on a precious crown of rubies, sapphires. &c, bearing the arms of the Pecci, which the Pope intends to send as a present to Alphonso XIII. It is said that Don Carlos has addressed an angry letter to the Pope, reproaching him with the favour shown the Alphonsists and vowing never to enter the Vatican during his reign. — There are 671 artists' models in Paris, of whom about one-half are Italian, 120 French, 80 German, 60 Swiss, 50 Spanish, 50 Belgian, 45 English, 30 American, and 1 Irish. Of the 671, 130 have passed their majority; all the rest are young girls between 16 and 20. — Pasteur's theory has received a severe strain in the death from hydrophobia of a Roumanian farmer who had been treated by the doctor under the most favourable circumstances. The man was bitten by a rabid dog the 11th May, and fourteen days thereafter was in Pasteur's hands. Nevertheless, hydrophobia carried him off. — The Munich correspondent of the Paris Figaro gives a detailed list of articles in one of the eight palaces of the late crazy King Ludwig of Bavaria, showing how his Majesty dissipated the royal revenues. In his cabinet de toilette, for instance, all the articles were of Saxon porcelain and cost the trifle of 2,000,000 marks. — The Mark Lane Express says Sir John Lawes alone spends more money in a year for the benefit of British agriculture than the State has spent in a generation. Yet there is nothing which would pay the aation better than judicious expenditure for the advancement of the most important of all industries. — ■*•* the royal marriage of Portugal, 1500 tons of fireworks material was used in celebration at Lisbon; 70,000 coloured lamps, 25,000 candles, 16 Piles of festooning chs^. and 16,000 flags were also brought into req< '.Miaou. —Italy is at a disadvantage for lack of fuel, and efforts are being made to in some manner remedy ths deficiency. A credit has been voted to pay the expenses of a thorough search of the kingdom in the hope of finding fossil- combustiMes^es^e^ly^ip&is.

—Over £1,000,000 is still spent yearly iv pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina. Many of the Mohammedan pilgrims travel immense distances. Thus nearly 6000 of them are from the Soudan and neighbouring parts of Africa, 7000 are Moors, 1400 Persians, 16,000 Malays and Indians, and 25,000 Turks or Egyptians. These are the figures for the year 1885, when there were 53,010 pilgrims to these two famous shrines. — Bananas are a lately introduced novelty in the English trade. They are brought irom the West Indies in a chamber in the vessel, the temperature of which is carefully regulated by machinery. — A Welsh coracle for one passenger upsets so easily that a stroke from a salmon's tail is said to be more than the cranky little boat can bear without being overturned. One person forms a full freight for a coracle of the usual size, besides the one who uses the paddle ; and that person being she oarsman's wife, he places her cautiously in the stern, and declines a second passenger. — Of 7000 persons inoculated for the yellow j fever by a Rio Janeiro physician only seven ! died of the disease, although the epidemic was of unusual intensity. — The oil discovered in the region of the Red Sea, in Egypt, was struck at a distance of only ! 156 feet from the surface, and but 400 feet from the sea. — India-rubber is threatened with a rival. The rubber dealers of Eastern Nicaragua think they have discovered a tree whose gum will give as much satisfaction as rubber, and will, in fact, take its place. They say that the milk of the tuno furnishes a most excellent gutta-percha, equal to the best found in the eastern tropics, while the number of trees is virtually inexhaustible, and the gum can be produced with a profit at twelve cents a pound. — A quaint phrase which a correspondent of The Critic has found iv Pennsylvannia and Virginia is " gimber-jawed." On seeing a portait of I George Eliot a Pennsylvanian lady axclaimed : •'How gimber-jawed she was ! " — Hon. Boyd Winchester. U.S., Minister to Switzerland, has found cheeses in that country more than 200 years old. In the cases where the : eating of new cheese has caused illness, a portion of this old cheese is given as a remedy, probably on the principle that the hair of a very old dog is good for the bite of a young one. — The largest dynamo in the world has been I set up in Cleveland, Ohio. It is 13ft long, s|f t wide, and weighs 10 tons — four times the size I and ability of the " Jumbo " machine exhibited by Edison at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1884. Five hundred horsepower is required to drive it, and its current furnishes incandescent lights of about 20,000 candle power. — The Argentine republic is augmenting the national debt to a fearful extent, so that gold touches 56 per cent, premium. — The flats at Paris at present unoccupied would accommodate 200,000 people, it is stated. — After the thirty years war in 1650. Berlin had only 6,000 inhabitants, and in 1861, 528,000. In 25 years these last figures have been more than doubled, an unprecedented fact in contemporaneous European history. — A German inventor is building at a cost of £25,000 a balloon 500 feet in length, to be operated by steam. He is very sanguine of success, and has been offered £30,000 for his patent. — In London they no longer call blood and thunder stories " penny dreadfuls," but " shilling shockers." — A newspaper paragraph says that the piles of old London Bridge, put down in the year 900, are still sound, the water and the blue mud of i the Thames having preserved them. — The deepest boring yet made is said to be at Schladebach, near the line between Leipsic and Corbetha. It has been made by the Prussian Government for the purpose of ascertaining | the presence of coal, and was bored with diamond drills. Its depth is 1390 metres, or 4560 ft, its breadth at the bottom 2in, and at the top llin. The temperature at the bottom indicates 118deg Fahr. — Professor Bently, who has recently commenced a series of lectures on the Physiology of Plants, asserts most emphatically that no grains which with certainty have been identified as contemporaneous with the deposit of the mummified corpse, have ever come to light. In cases where the so-called mummy wheat has germinated, it has been introduced into the coffin shortly before, or at the time of discovery of the j body. Professor Bentley does not name a limit to the time during which seeds retain their vitality, but he says that very few will germinate after being three years old. ' — The average height of Europe has been estimatedl by a German geographer to be 940 ft. Switzerland shows the greatest mean height, 4624 ft, and the Netherlands the least, 31ffc. Intermediate are Spain and Portugal, 2298 ; Austria, 1698 ; Italy, 1596 ; France, 1292 ; British Islands, 714 ; Germany, 601 ; Russia, 598 ; Denmark, 115. — The belief in witchcraft is a remnant of the ancient nature worship which existed in the boyhood of the world. It is, as ethnologists say, a "survival." The"incubi" and "succubi," the demon cats, and the were-wolves, the compassing of death by making images of wax, and then putting them before a slow fire, the pricking of clay busts with pins, the spells and the evil eye, the trial by water, and a host of similar rites are all to be found in savage mythology. — Standard. — It is said that a pure negro never died of phthisis before the war ; now deaths from phthisis among the blacks is four times as great as among the whites, concerning which Dr Tipton, of Selma, Ala., says: " This change has come, in my opinion, as the result of the violent striking of the the shackles from the hands of a people who for generations have lived as slaves — the sudden lifting of all restraint, the violent swing of the pendulum from a simple life of toil and bondage to one of liberty, license, and all that inevitable brood of disasters that follow surely and swiftly upon the heels of outraged and violated natural laws." To have the courage of your opinions in France, whether you are a Royalist, like the Due de Broglie, or a Republican, like M. Jules Simon, is to be an enemy of the people, and to be brushed aside as useless. M. de Freycinet exists as a Minister by the toleration of people who would sweep him away at once if he dared to have views of his own and abide by them Accordingly, he has to trim and manoeuvre, and keep himself afloat by dexterity. — Standard. — There are 675,000 persons convicted annually of crime in the British Empire. Of this number more than nineteen-twentieths pertain to India. — The Kirghese and Cossacks who dwell on the Orenburgh Plains take great delight in wolfhunting. They mount their fleet little horses and set forth armed with heavy clubs. When the snow is deep and does not have a fi.rm^jugtf ' a wolf is easily run down, g^fePsmks into the snow at every_^§tepr' an d soon becomes exhauste.d r --^He finally sits down on his JlSSScnes and quietly waits for the fatal blow of I the club.