MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 1950, 4 April 1889, Page 37

MULTUM IN PARVO.

—It is 'a singular fact that some woods • when mechanically combined conduce to mutual decay ; such ill-fated unions are cypress and cedar, and cypress and walnut. — Paris eats a vast quantity of snails. Every day 90,0001b are sent to the city from the gardens of Burgundy, Champagne, Provehcej and Poitou, where they are specially reared for this purpose. They are not only eaten as a delicacy, but also on account of their highly nutritious qualities. — "Llan" is the prefix to the names of upwards of 450 places in Wales. —It took 22 years to build St. Paul's Cathedral. —One remarkable result of a tidal wave in the province of Baunan, Java, has been a great insrease of tigers. The land laid waste soon relapsed into a jungle, affording welcome cover to. the tigers, which became so daring and numerous that whole villages have to be' abandoned. —The White and Black Seas are named after the ice of the one and the tempests to whichrthe other is subject. -r?There has been a great revival of values in London real estate within the last 12 months.- > Throughout the populous sections of England prices have shown a steady advance, which is said to be due to the tendency of investment at the present time. — Alcohol is said to claim a thousand victims a week in England and Wales. —The firm of Bass is said to have £750,000 invested in casks, uses 100 tons of hops a week, at a cost of from lOgs to3ogs a hundredweight ; and has three breweries in the town of Burton, one of which alone cost £90,000 to build. —It is said that a spring of natural cologne has broken forth; in the southern part of Algiers. The liquid has not been analysed, but its odour is very similar, to that of patchouli. ' —From two to three tons of stamps are despatched ' daily from Somerset House ; at certain seasons, such as Christmas and other exceptionally busy periods of the year, the weight removed in a single day by, .the. post-, office vans reaches, as mpoh aSveight tons. —In an interview Bishop A. Cleveland Ooxe declares . that infidelity in' France is so prevalent that very little else is to be found. Pf the 36,000,000 people the number of those who make their Easter communion does not reach 1,000,600. - The foreign tailors in St. George's-in-the-East were in 1881 61 per cent, of all the tailors in that district, and by 1887 the number had risen to 83 per cent. In other trades, such as waiters in hotels, there was a corresponding increase in the percentage of foreign labour. — England has more than half the cotton spindle.B in the world, and uses more than half' the cotton worked by them, while English spinning is unrivalled in the excellence of its production and the cheapness of its price. —A Worthington (Indianapolis) telegram Of January 8 says: — " Dr J. A. Minick, of this town, performed the most remarkable operation of surgery that has been performed in * this county for more than a century by taking a rib from John Hixson, of Linton. It was a successful operation. The patient is doing remarkably well, feeling comfortable, and will be well in a few weeks. — A working man was ordered by the Cheshire County Court to pay £167 costs in a divorce suit. The bill of costs came before the judge in the Queen's Bench, who made an order that the payment should be made at the rate of sixpence per week! Leaving interest out, of the question, it would take 109 years to .discharge this obligation. — Certain parts oi Italy are being almost deserted by able-bodied labourers and artisans, who.' are flocking away in multitudes. Brazil attracts a great many ; others go down in to the Argentine Confederation, and the rest find their way to the UnitedStates. The desertion of the farms by the young men leaves all the labour to be performed by women. —Asbestos was first mined as an article of commerce in Canada in 1878. In the first year the shipments at the mines were about 300 tons. In 1888 the quantity had risen to 4619 tons ;*the value of the shipments having increased from £4000 to £46,000. — The members of the House of Lords own more than one-third of the land of Great Britain. — Sponges when first taken out. of the water are dark in colour, and look more like beef liver than anything. — The falls of Niagara carry down 10,000,000 cubic feet of water per minute, equal to about 3,000,000 horse-power. — It is stated that five of the English bishops are upwards of 80 years of age — nameryjHihe Bishops of Chichester, St. All&ans, Worcester, Bath and Wells, and St. Asaph. Three others are 77, and three others, though much younger, are chronic invalids— namely, the Bishops of Durham, Truro, and Oxford. —According to careful calculations made by a British clergyman of note and just published, Protestants have increased during the last hundred years from 37,000,000 to 134,000,000, or, nearly fourfold. —The so-called expression with which the eyes are generally credited is largely imagination, as may be seen by placing a number of persons behind a screen, or with paper masks that have holes just allowing the eyes to be seen. But little expression can be seen in the wide-opened eye of joy or sorrow, anger or love, these being mainly produced by the innumerable musdes of the face, especially round the mouth, the manipulation of the eyelids, and the pose of the head. —The Emperor of Russia has one estate which covers over 100,000,000 acres, and which is, in fact, more than three times as large as England ; and he has.another estate which is more than twice the size of Scotland. But, after all, an acre in London is better than 100,000,000 acre 9 in the Russian Steppes. The Czar's biggest estate brings him in only £95,000 a year. Land has been sold in London in recent years for as much as £1000 a square yard. An acre at that price is worth £4,840,000, and the interest on that, »urn at only 2$ per cent, is £121,000. —Mt Gosohen's conversion soheme has saved the British taxpayer £1.400,000 a year, and. srjll. ? ultimately save them £2,800,000 a year.

—That heredity Js .fate is taught.. by jEschylus and Sophocles, but not more emphatically than it is now taught by our nineteenth-century evolutionists of England, , France, and Germany, who discourse of "reversion," " pas-en-arriere," or "Kuckschlag"as dominating all character. The passenger bird takes across the English Channel the self -same aerial path which his ancestor took in days when forests waved where now the silver streak glitters, but according to our evolutionists he takes it not more instinctively than a man will follow the course taken by his remote ancestry should circumstances tend to develop any given' group of potentialities inherited from the ancestral strain, — Athenaaum. —Two duellists recently fought in Paris with bows and arrows. Shooting began at will. After a while one' of them got frightened and ran, climbed a tree and became a target for his pursuer, who shot till his arrows were exhausted, and then went home to breakfast. The man in the tree was pretty badly wounded, but will recover. — During 100 years our missionaries have marched in the van of the noblest movements of England. In the abolition of slavery, in the education of India, in the exposure of the liquor traffic which is bringing ruin to the African races, in the protection of the aboriginal tribes for whose welfare England has made herself responsible in many parts of the world, the missionary voice has uniformly expressed the moral sense of the national wrong-doing in the past, and an aid to national right- doing in the future, because I honestly believe that the missionary instinct forms the necessary spiritual complement of the aggressive genius of our English race. — Sir W. ty. Hunter. — Commander Lynch, of the United States navy, in an account, written some years ago, of an expedition of his to Western Africa, says that then but one Englishman was known to have survived' the climate of Sierra Leone for five years, and at the end of that time the fever carried him pf£. Years ago the Portuguese colonised an island off West Africa,' and 40 years later there -was but one individual living in whose veins ran the blood of any of the 7000 colonists who had settled there. — In Brazil there is a tribe called Oaf usos, which have sprung into existence by marriage between the long, stiff-haired natives and the imported negro slaves. As might naturally be expected from the admixture of these extremes, this people possess - hair of a very extraordinary kind. It rises perpendicularly from the head in, thick, curly masses, and forms' a, wig of such .enormous dimensions that the possessors must stoop low when entering their huts. t ' , — The subject of the difference of colour in the human race is one that has been a puzzle to ethmologists from the earliest times, and even the advanced scientists of to-day have not, been able to givd any thoroughly satisfactory explanation of it. It is' evident- that it does not depend upon climate alone, for some of the hottest parfcs of the w~orld are inhabited" by raoes which i are almost as f air as Europeans. • ' —In this century- (famine is recorded in Ireland in' lBl7-18-iaVagain. in 1822, when "men asked what crimes were punishable with imprisonment, for in the prisons there was food ; " and again, as in 1818, famine was followed by typhus. And then we come to the great famine of 1847-4:8, when the people died on the roads and in the fields, on the mountains and in the glens "death, desolation, and despair," it was said in Parliament, "reigning through the land." A million and a-half of the people had disappeared before it was over : systematic ' emigration set in, and in 40 years the population of Ireland had fallen from 8,175,000 to 1 s,l74,ooo.— Frederic Harrison, in the " Contemporary Eeyiew." —A method of solidifying petroleum has just been discovered. A small quantity of soap is added, and the mixture is heated. When it is allowed to cool the product can be cut into small cubes like those of compressed charcoal. Thus petroleum can be used as a combustible, it being now easy to transport and manipulate it. — The millionaires of the world amount to some 700 persons. England boasts of 200 millionaires; the United States of 100; France has 75. Jay Gould is the millionaire of millionaires, owning capital to the extent of 55,000,000 of money. His annual income is £3,000,000. Mackay, the bonanza king, comes next in the list, and the Eofchsctilds figure in the third place. These three own 150,000,000 of money between them. — Not only is there no white race in India, j not only is there no white colony, but there is no white man who purposes to remain. No ruler stays there to help, or criticise, or moderate his successor. No successful white man founds a family. No white man who makes a fortune builds a house or buy's an estate for his descendants. The very planter, the very engine-driver, the very foreman of works, "departs before he is 60, leaving no child, or house, or trace of himself behind. No white man takes root in India, and the number even of sojourners is amongst those masses imperceptible. — Meredith Townshend. —It is always instructive, though often unpleasant, to see ourselves as others see us. The Japanese are on the look-out—advertis-ing, *ln fact— for a new religion, and Professor Max Muller was requested by a Japanese ambassador to propound one. The professor suggested Christianity as perhaps the best article of its class in the market at present. Unluckily, his questioner had lived in Christian England, and answered very pertinently that it would not suit his people, for it was mixed up with politics, and moreover, had converted Europe into one vast camp, where genius was spent in inventing machines for killing our fellow creatures. Is it wonderful that the Japanese agaia preferred Buddhism to listening to the missionaries of 'a continent which, while preaching with a million tongues the gospel of peace, has brought not peace on earth, but a sword? The strength of Samson v» in his hair, and a lfkt> influence still has, mighty away, for what fa more potent than a beautiful bead of hair. Yet. as in the 'instance of oar similitude, great care Is needed for its preservation. How Mrs S. A. Allen eecurei this result, for when the hair shows signs of falling or turning prematurely jpfey, tor Hair Restorer, so .fortifies the, sources ofwpplythfrttfUe Atamebtt are reproduetd in tbelrn&ccral colour, and with augmented brilUanoy and abundance, 7