MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 1875, 28 October 1887, Page 6

MULTUM IN PARVO.

, — The importance of soft; water' for domestic purposes is illustrated by the experience of a large London asylum, in which a change from hard to, soft water has resalted in an estimated annual saving in soda, soap, labour, &c, of more than £800. —Bouquets of daisies and bluebells must not be carried in Alsace and Lorraine, under penalty of three months' imprisonment in a Fatherland prison. — Germany is, to a greater extent than is commonly suspected, a land of old people. At the time of the last census there were in the empire no fewer than 232 persons who had completed their one-hundredth year. Of these, 72 were men and 160 women. The oldest person in Germany was a man in his one-hundred and twentieth year. — There is a 'watch in a Swiss museum only three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter inserted in the top of a pencil case. Its little dial not only indicates the hours, minutes, and seconds, but also days of the month. — -In Hyderabad, which by comparison possesses great agricultural and mineral resources, the Nizam raises £4,000,000 yearly from a population of 9,000,000. —P. S. Popoff, Chinese Secretary to the Russian Legation atPekin, has just published a pamphlet on the Chinese population, in which he states it to be 382,000,000, as against 413,000,000 in the year 1842. His statistics are derived from Chinese official sources. — The German Emperor has sent to the Pope, as a memento of Papal jubilee, a mitre of exquisite workmanship, adorned with brilliants, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. The present was accompanied by an autograph letter. — The Gregorian Calendar was adopted in i Great Britain 1751, and in 1752 eleven days j were left out of the calendar— September 3 being reckoned as the 14th, so that there were in September 1752 only JO days. /v — The heaviest h tea in hammer in the world is the 150-ton hammer erected hist year ( 188(5) at Krupp's works, Mssen. At the Cockerell works (in Belgium) there is v 100ton hammer built in 1885. These are the only ones 100 ions and over. Oieusot is an SO-ton one. — The consumption of sugar in the last. 50 years has gone up from about 151b to 701b per head ; of tea, from 1,-J-lb to 4slbper head ; of tobacco, from o*Bolb to I*4 olb per head; ivnd so on. — An important measure now pending in Japan is the marriage law. Children by coneubiiiGS are now recognised, but the effect of this law will be to make them illegitimate. The present Emperor is the child of a concubine, and so is the heir apparent, — A vesselnamed " Now Then," designed by Herreshoff, recently 4 completed for Mr Munro, of New York, has made the remarkable speed of 28 miles an hour. She has 81ft in length at the water line, 10ft beam, and draws 3ft 3in of water. When going afc her best speed she is not much shaken by big waves, because she jumps, it is said, from crest to crest. — In England, a cln^d cannot be employed Cull time in a factory or workshop under 13 years of age, and if such child has nofc passed Standard IV, or made the required number of attendances, he must attend school halftime until he is 14 years old. — A public crematory is being built at Philadelphia, at a cost of n^arjy £8000, and a large association has been formed of persons who pledge themselves to be burnt at death. —The authorities at the University of Berlin will have nothing to do with idle students. No fewer than 108 have just been struck off the roll for "lack of diligence." Among the number are 48 foreigners. — In London, with all its numerous interests, with nearly 5,000,000 inhabitants and nearly 700,000 houses, there is no delivery of letters on the Sabbath. The .ramie jfching may be said of more than 4000 country districts in Great Britain. — One of the first acts of the German Government, after the anjje^tion of Alsace and Lorraine, was to ereci. a uniyprsity in Strasbourg at a cost of £640,000. The cost of the endowment of this building, paid from Imperial funds, is nearly £50,000 a year. —Sixty thousand Americans go to Europe annually;. They are not poor, going to seek homes ; a few go on necessary business, but the great mass go for pleasure and to say that they have been abroad, ','^ijv do not, with the fare both ways, spend less than lOOOdol each. That means 60,0Q0,000d01. That means almost as' much as all' the gold and silj/or taken ,from our mines ; it means enough to foupcl a great State or 25 great colleges. And it is ail ro^ney. What other nation could stand such a drain 1 -.-tb.e@osjbo£ the Technical Ijfigh School of Berlin has exceeded £400,000; new chemical laboratories have been added to the Polytechnic of Zurich afc a cost of £70,000; a new electrical laboratory has been erected at Paris afc a eosfc of £14,000. — Welshmen are called " Tafiies " becpuse David is the most common name among Welshmen, and David, familiarly Davy, becomes in Welsh Taffid, Taffy. i — r-The congregational incomes of the §CQttp^a churches from all sources stand j thus:— Established, £648,000, or 23s per member; Jfr,ee, £#55,900, or 21s 9d per ! member; United fr&sby^pjj-p^, £187,000, or | 20s Gd pcjr member. ! —About 400,000 makes are killed eyery ' year in British India, Thg fees paid as rewards annually for the clekU'Mt>k) n °t beasts of prey and venomous snakes My ihe Government of India amount to about ; £»00. ' —^'hs^e }s a large factory in Bridgeport, i neat Ciiieago, employing about 100 men, ' boys and girls, in whM? WP-ste animal blood is converted into buttons, SJot pnly are buttons made from blood, but tons of &w? rings, breast-pins, belt-clasps, combs, and ' i trinkets are made annually there from blood. It is a queer, odoriferous business, but a paying one. — Through the strike at Bolton, a foreign machinery order, which would have employed' 1600 hands for six years, has been j lost to the ioWh. I 1 —An immerise drainage z/prk undertaken i by the Russian Government con.ten*piajteg the recovery of' the vasfc-regictf .fenown'as the Pinsk in' the southwest of Buscia, 1 near the borders of Orallicia, 1 and'- which

hitherto has prevented communication, not only betweeta the Eussian districts on either side, but also between Russia' and AustroGermany. Up to the present time about 4,000,000 acres have been reclaimed by means of the construction of several thousand miles of ditches and canals. — News (says the Court Journal) has just reached a member of the Imperial Russian Archhieological Commission' of the discovery so far north-east as Tashkehd, of a very great number of Greek terra- cotta vases, and also of silver-gilt ornaments and fragments of statuettes, all of Greek design. One of the results of this discovery will be to give a far greater extent than has ■ hitherto been imagined to Greek influence' in Central Asia, and greatly to extend also the probable frontiers of the Greek kingdom of Bactria. — Outside the walls of Jerusalem a new town has sprung up, a building club having been established a few years ago, under the operation of which 130 houses were erected in four years by the Jews, whilst along the Jaffa road many country villas have been erected of late by European residents as summer abodes. The latest development of the building of new houses without Jerusalem is to be found in the enterprise which has led to much building being done on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, the summit of which is crowned with the church of the Ascension. — The American nation pays every year nearly £40,000,000 sterling for tobacco consumed in cigars and cigarettes, and £4,000,000 for tobacco consumed in pipes. In addition, the bill paid annually in the United States for chewing tobacco amounts to £10,000,000 sterling; so that the entire sum spent last year upon the commodity by our Transatlantic kinsmen amounted to the amazing aggregate of about £54,000,000 Stirling. — A hospital for animals will soon be erected in London, and at the same time free dispensaries will be opened, where the hoises, donkeys, cats, dogs, and birds of the poor can be treated when ill. — The now departure with regard to Ireland initialed by Mr Gladstone, be it right or be it wrong, has inspired such terror in the English capitalist that he no longer dares to invest anything whatever in that country. Out of, I think, 118 projects before the Irish Board of Public Works, for which capital was likely to be advanced when Mr b ladstone's altered views became known, only four, I understand, have come to the birfch, and those under very exceptional conditions. — Grant Duff. — The floating island on Lake Derwentwater has again made its appearance. It came to the surface of the lake near Lodore, after complete submersion for nearly three years. The cause of the phenomenon has never been satisfactorily explained, but it is believed the island is buo>ed up by gas produced by decomposed vegetable matter. On piercing the island with a boathook, gas issues in abundance. The last time the island appeared was in the autumn of 1884. — In the German empire not only are the interests of the military class of paramount consideration among the soldiers, but the idea of German unity and German greatness are in the mind of the people bound up with the army. The army has become an idol to the whole nation,' and to propose disarmament would sound to a patriotic German' the wildest and most treasonable of sch'emqs. — Spectator ■ . — Mr Faunce de Laune has had some cigarettes manufactured from tobacco grown by him in Kent last year. The tobacco is golden in colour, and like nearly all golden tobacco, is hot in smoking. It burns with a black ash. Stj.ll it is qutye equal to a good deal of the foreign tobacco sold in the shops. Mr de Laune's tobacco plants were grown in good soil, and in warm spots sheltered by hops, so that they had an excellent chance of doing well. — Last year the quantity of coal and other minerals wrought in the United Kingdom was 170,000,000 tons, and for this we gave 953 lives, or one for every 178,391 tons. Calculating it in another way, one life was lost for every 545 persons employed, giving a death rate from accidents of 1-8:53 per 1000 persons employed. This is, happily, under the average of the 10 years from 1874 to 1883, which amounted to 2-238. — An oath-bound labour ' organisation, known as "The Brotherhood," is said to have gained a large ' membership in New England. It was founded in May 188(5, and ; its objects appear to be substantially the ! same as those of the Knights of Labour except that its policy is opposed to strikes. The 'names of its officers, the location of its , headquarters, and the extent of its ramifica- i tions, are carefullyguarded secrets. — It is said that a woman began the ' manufacture of l sewing-thread in England I in 1722, arid it would seem proper that the ide^ gfiould have first come from that sex | through whose hands nine-tentjis of the thread passes that is used. Paisley has the | honour of being $he first town that embarked |n the business. It was called " Js T uns thread," was made offlax, and so rapidly increased in popularity that it was not long before it became an Important branoh of manufacture. — The city authorities of Paris have just tested an Austrian invention for automatically lowering coffins into graves without ropes. A coffin was placed on a kind of rectangular platform and surrounded with funeral drapery, which concealed the grave. $'he'& $ spring was pressed the platform, witfr jts lug^b.'ri.qus burden, descended slowly into the earf Ji. The price' ,qf the apparatus h&f}Q,d>u& the j'nyent.pr states that it is in use in VimM 8W? Milan, thp rate payable being six f ranos for gach purial. - -The oldest man in the world \f sajd to be James James, a coloured citizen, who resides in Santa Rosa, Mexico. He is 135 years old. He was born near Dorchester, S.C., in 1752. H# was one of the labourers at Fort Moultre during the unsuccessful attack by the British fleet in 1776. He was then 24 year 3 old.