MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 1951, 11 April 1889, Page 37

MULTUM IN PARVO.

—Coins of;- low denominations circulate very rapidly"; thus it is calculated that every penny in circulation in Great Britain changes hands a dozen times a week. — Cotton has long since oeased to be the product of the negro. When the American civil war ceased nine-tenths of it was raised by the colon'red race; to-day three-fifths come from' white farms. —Rather more than 1,000,000 people are treated every year at the hospitals of London and the dispensaries and convalescent homes 1 in connection with them. - —A correspondent of the London Times says that the word " teetotal " had its origin through a stuttering temperance orator, who urged on his heaters that nothing less than " te-te-te-total abstinence would satisfy tern-, perance reformers." Someone at once adopted " teetotal " as a suitable word, and it spiang into general use. ", —Of every 1001b of wheat consumed in the United Kingdom, 301b are grown there, 351b in the United States, 151b in the British colonies, 81b in Russia, and 121b in other countries. — " Albert " chains are so called after the Prince Consort, who was presented with a chain of this description on his visit to the Birmingham Exhibition of 1846. —A few years ago the Argentine Republic did not raise wheat enough for home consumption. Last year it exported 7,000,000 bushels. Immense tracts of pasture are being converted into farm land, and the country is becoming a great grain-growing region. —All the Japanese war vessels are to be lighted with electricity. —There are 106 different tongues— not dialects — spoken in India, of which 18 are spoken by more than 1,000,000 persons. —An enormous number of animals are killed iti Siberia yearly for their fur. At the last summer Fair of Irbit, which is a market for only a part of the furs exported from Siberia, no less than 3,180,000 skins of squirrels were 1 offered for sale. Of other varieties therejsvere 11,000 blue fox, 140,000 marmot, 30,000 polecat, 10,000 badger, 1,300.000 hare, and 2000 fox. —The death-rate of the globe is computed to be 67. a minute, 96,480 a day, and 35,214,200 a year; the birth-rate 70 a minute, 100;800 a day, and 36,772,000 a year. — The number of persons who sleep in the open air every night in London is 6000 at least. —Spectacles (to be used in surgical operations), lit by means of a small electric lamp, are a new invention. The lamp is arranged to send a beam of cool light on the part to be examined ; meanwhile the rims of the spectacles exclude the outside light from the observer's eyes. The current is conveyed to the lamp by wires attached to the small terminals. —One house in Berlin, that of Mr Borsig, has turned out 4000 locomotives since 1840, in which year Mr Borsig began with a capital of £1500 lenf him by a friend. He employs 10,000 men. —Formerly when ,a Turkish baker was discovered to have sold bread of short weight, his ear was nailed fast to his doorpost, and he was then supplied with a sharp knife, to work, when tired of his fixed position, his own deliverance, —Ross-shire and Connaught are themost illiterate parts of the kingdom. —The Welsh language is spoken by upwards of 1,000,000 peeple. — In Algeria there is a small stream which the chemistry of Nature has converted into ferae ink. It is formed by the union of two rivulets, one of which is very strongly impregnated with iron, while the other, meandering through a peat marsh, imbibes gallic acid, another ingredient in the formation of ink. Letters and manuscript matters are satisfaororily written with this singular natural compound of iron and gallic acid. —It is estimated that the population of China increases by about 4,00 S O,OOO per year. —The most extensive bee farm in the world is probably near Becton, in Canada. It covers four acres, and the owner in a favourable year secures not less than 75,0001b of honey from his 19,000,000 little workers. — Among other curiosities at present on exhibition at the public room of the Figaro office (writes the Paris correspondent of the Irish Textile Journal), is a piece of the stuff presented to President Carnot by the Elbeuf weaver, and which is entirely woven out of clog's hair. The idea of the Elbeuf weaver has pleased the whimsical taste of Paris, and that a demand for dogs' hair tissues has sprung up here, both for ladies' dresses and waistcoats for foppish young men, is not to be wondered at. —Caroline Herschel, the discoverer of eight comets, and the accomplished partner of her brother's astronomical labours, never could remember the multiplication table, and always had to carry a copy of it about with her. — Drawn by the causes which drew the barbarians to the Mediterranean, the Russian people are abandoning the, sterile north, and sweeping slowly but irresistibly in a ceaseless tide towards the more fertile shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian. The immigration never stops, the multiplication never stops. The Slavs increase like Anglo-Saxons, until already social .difficulties arise from overcrowding ; and Russia begins, like England and Italy, to need a place for the overspill of her people. She has no colonies, the Caucasus is too mountainous, her wide dominion in Northern Asia has been made dreadful to her people by her own cruelties, and the only outlet remaining is Persia, the bright and fertile land across the Caspian, which is, and by the will of Nature always must be, an enclosed Russian lake. — Spectator. —Sir John Sinclair says :— " While money can be saved either by cutting off unnecessary offices and gratuities, or by checking useless expenses, no Minister ought to apply for an augmentation of imposts. It is only by a strict and inviolable attention to such a system that the rulers of a burdened people can flatter themselves a nation will long remain in quiet subjection ; for nothing can be more galling to those oppressed and overloaded than to see others wallowing in nohes extorted from them-by the ohioanery ana artifioes of finance, while .they can but Barely furnish themselves with the means of subsistence,"

—Practically the struggle between poor and rich in Ireland; between Catholic and Protestant, between Irishman and Englishman, is the same to-day that it has been for more than a century, mitigated in part, with several of its enormities removed, most of its blood-thirstiness extinct, but with the most systematic apparatus of martial law ever applied to a European people in the absence of war, and with the^ original and fundamental enormity even increased in force— viz., that millions upon millions of the earnings of half -starved Irish labourers are sent over yearly to mere foreign creditors whose very names are hardly known, who have never spent one sixpence on tenant, land, or Ireland, and who have no moral right whatever to receive back a sixpence, except so far as appears in a series of documents all based upon confiscation. — Frederic Harrison, in the " Contemporary." — The immense number of foreigners in London, Manchester, and other large towns of England has led to a curious result in the matter of butchers' meat. The Mark Lane Express says :— " Truly there is no accounting for tastes. The demand in the • foreign' quarters of London for roasts and fillets of horseflesh has assumed such proportions that meat vendors are obliged to maintain a constant supply of this equine product. Nor do they make any secret of the new departure in their trade ; cuts of horseflesh have been for some time openly displayed in the shop windows. And, to make bad worse, soup, made of horseflesh, is served daily in several restaurants frequented by foreigners, as well as steaks and daintily-prepared-entrees, Theie must, after all, be some truth in the ancient, if rather illogical, proverb— 4To him that hath lost his taste sweet is sour 1 '" —It is stated that there are 4000 pledged abstainers amongst the 14,000 cabmen in London. • • , , —We are now paying over £7,000,000 a year in pensions — equal to an income-tax of nearly sixpence in the pound. If alf the money went to deserving persons, no one would complain -; but a great part)of it is distributed among people who have done nothing whatever to entitle them to it. We have 2333 I admirals on the retired list, besides j4B on half-way, to say nothing of 109 ' unemployed generals, and any number of retired colonels. It is not their fault that} they have nothing to do. It arises from changes in the service, which were necessitated by the abolition of purchase, a reform which seems of more and more doubtful advantage as time goes on. It does not appear to have promoted efficiency in the army; it has undoubtedly added enormously to the pension list.— World. —A tooth 'of Sir Isaac Newton was sold jn 1815 for the sum of £730. It was purchased by a nobleman who had it set in a ring which he wore constantly on his finger. The^iatworn by Napoleon Bonaparte at the battle of Eylau was sold in Paris, in 1835, for a sum equal to £80. It was put up for' sale at £20 and there were 32 bidders. The 'coat worn •by Charles XII at the battle of Pultowa, and preserved by one of his officers and attendants, was sold in 1825 for the immense sum of £23,375. The two penremplbyed in signing the Treaty of Amiens were sold in 1825 for £500. A "wig that had belonged to Ste me was sold at a public auction in London for 200gs. The prayer-book used by Charles I when on the scaffold was sold in London in 1825 for' lOOgs. A waiscoat belonging to J. J. Rousseau was sold for £40, and his metal watch for £20. — The following is quoted from Dean Stanley's " Canterbury Lectures ":—"" :— " There are five great landings in English history, each of vast importance. The landing of Julius Caesar, which first revealed to us the civilised world. The landing of Hengist a^nd Horsa, which gave us our English forefathers and English characters. The landing of Augustine, which gave us our English Christianity. The landing of William the Conqueror, which gave us our Norman aristocracy. The landing of William 111, which gave us our free constitution. — Apparently the Panama Canal has not damped the Frenchmen's ardour for this sort of thing. The design of the proposed bridge over the English Channel includes four railway lines, besides a carriage road and footpaths; and refuges, watch houses, alarm bells, and powerful lights are to be placed at frequent intervals. The bridge is to be about 160 ft above the level of the sea at high tide, while the piles that support it are to be about 540 yds apart. The cost is estimated at thirty-two millions sterling, and it is stated that the work could be begun and ended within a period of six years. — Since the Crimean War the world has hardly known an interval of peace. The Crimean War was followed by the Indian Mutiny, and the Mutiny by the campaign of j the French against the Austrians, and the j following year saw the Italian revolutions ; i and then the great American Civil War broke out, and soon the war between Austria and Prussia, and' then the war between France and Prussia, ending in the occupation of Paris and the complete triumph of Germany, and the creation of a German Empire. Meantime and after we had on our own account all manner of small wars in Asia and in North and South Africa, and the sword of England was hardly ever/ in its sheath. — " Contemporary Review." — A clergyman the other Sunday followed up a stirring sermon on the speedy approach of the world's final catastrophe, by an appeal for a liberal contribution for rebuilding the tower of the church. —The Germans number nearly 40,000 voters in the city of New York. Honest and incorruptible, and generally intent upon voting correctly, they rarely act with anything approaching unanimity. —The title of " duke " has not always been „ extant since its creation in the reign of Edward I. There were no dukes in Elizabeth's time, and the title was revived by James I, who created George Yilliers Duke of Buckingham. " Good wdtb hkrds iro bush," neither is it necessary to extol the virtues of Bgwlandi' Macassar On, which for nearly 100 years has been considered the best and safest preparation for the hair of children and adults, being perfectly free from any lead, poisonous or mineral ingredient. It prevents and arrests baldness, and produces a luxuriant and glossy growth of hair. Sold also in a golden colour for fairhaired ohildren and adults. Rowlands' Broom, is a pure and delicate toilet powder in three tints— white, rose, and oream. A»k Chemist* and store* for Bowlatob' artioles, of 30 Hatton Garden, London, and avoid noxious imitation*.