MULTUM IN PARVO.
— Kangaroos will sooa be extinct in Australia. •' — Bullets were formerly made of stone. — Beauty shows Tver© first held in Belgium. — Pen 6 are made almost entirely by ■women. — Baron was at one time the only title _in the peerage. — Birmingham turns out *000 miies of "wire a week. — Last year Argentina Britain 3,575,000cwt of beef. — Bigamy was formerly punished ;n; n Engr land by death. — Slate billiard tables were introduced va. England in 1827. — The French War Office costs £28,000,000 — equal to £48 a man. — The eagles of the French colours hare been made of aluminium. — The United Kingdom railway season tickets last year cost £4.518,000. — Two" dogs can draw a sleigh carrying 2501b a. distance of 20 miles in five hours. — Excluding- Orkney and tha Shetland Island. Scotland, has about 5700 policemen. — TJ» -total quantify of«>utter Britain received *last. yea:. -from other, countries was 210,542. tens. — The^'Bank of France ,.!s owa-ed by 28,200 sfcrreholders.. ***• t^'A sturgeon weighing 2001b will "give 40ft>\ ©£. caviare. tt * — Gfqib sf-reteb.es 5 per ©eftt. in. the pro&2ss of bleaching,- , > — Factory engines usually consume 21b of ,ccal per •borse-power 'each. hour. - — Naval seamen-, as a swimming test. have to swim 100 yard* with clothes on. — Before it is completed a pen passes ■through the hands of a score-of workers. -7- Tampering 'with Government arms renders a man liable to serious punishment. — A naval officer on the activo list on full pay cannot be a director <f a x>mpany. — The highest telephone in the world is said to be on- ilonte Rosa. The lino attains a height of about W75 yards above the sea level. It passes ovex Mount (Men, thence to Giufetti, and on to the obseTvatory of Monte Rosa. — Not content with his golden brown jdress suit, Signor Caruso has invested in, a. kilt, for wthi-ch he has paid an Edinburgh tailor £75. He will wear it wiben performing in "Lucia di Latnmermpor" at the Hamburg Opera shortly, and when he sings the part at New York next winter the costly- garment will again bs called into requisition.. ... . . — "Sterilise Che cow, and the milk wall talte ©are- of itself." This theory inspired Mr Kelsey, of th< School of Experimental Fanning in Cincinnati, owner of £15.000 worth of Jerseys, who declares, in a report ;ust published, that he has largely increased ■che quantity and quality of his milk because "the cows are bathed every day. their teeth are cleaned with a brush three times daily, and during the hot weather the animals are protected by linen coats, which keep off the flies and mosquitoes and prevent them from being worried. - j — The most- remarkable bed-quilt in the world has been allotted space- in the Women of. All Nations Exhibition at Olyunpia. It is .Bft square, and has taken- one woman, a Mrs Thompson, of Old Kent road, 23 years to make. , She has devoted three .hours a day during that time to stitching it. It J6 made up of over 7000 tiny pieces of various-coloured velvets, silks, and satins, and each piece has_ been care<ful!y bordered wittti gold silk. It is valued at £200, there being over £50 worth of material alone in it. — China is the great srvuff-taking country I of the world, and there ie a snuff there •worth the theoretical fancy price of £200,000 a pound which is handed round at the great banquets. Its high value comes in this way. The rich Chinamen buy the bulk of their snuff from Portugal, where there ar« families owning private old-time recipes, -who sell their muff at from £40 to £150 a pound to the Chinese. Then the Chinamar keeps it many years, and, the legal xafce of interest bsimg 32 per cenr. per annum, its theoretical value soon increases. The Chinese carry it in 'beautiful bottles of porcelair and Agate, miracles of art, which are worth from half a sovereign to £200 each. — The most widely circulated books in the whole world is a Chinese Almanack, printed- in PcCcing, at the Imperial Press. The edition consists of eight million c-opies, -which are ssnt" into the provinces, and to great is the interest taken by the Chinese in the publication, ,so high the confidence •reposed in the information con.ta.ined, that of the eight million copies not one comes back to the^ printers. Nothing approacnjray these figured 'is attained by any publication, in the Western, world. The work which attains -ihe widest, circulation in Kiirope and America 13 the Bible, and next to the Bible in popularity comes "Don Quixote."' fend then "Uncle Tom's Caibin." jDhie is difficult of acceptation to-day, erthoug-li 50 years ago the, claim of "Uncle Tom" would not have been questioned. The fifth >n order of merit belongs, accordting to the Munich News, to an alphabet took, published at Eosea by Baedeker, "which has run through 1200 .editions. Then we have the Illustrated Geography of Seydlitz and the classics of Schiller, "William Tell" being the most popular. - Of this work one million copies have been sold. It ■would be interesting to know the respective places of Shakespeare, Burns, and Sir Walter Scott. — With a view to encouraging the export of cotton yarns last year to China, lottery tickets were given away by Japanese spinners with every bundle of yarn sold, a system strenuously objected to by Hongkong and Shanghai foreign -nerchants, and one, perhaps, which does not commend •tsslf -o foreign ideas of pushing business (says -a consular report). JThe Japanese spinners, however, maintained that their action svas justified, as they claimed to be theroug-hly conversant with Chinese 'deas and requirements, and that their principal object was to encourage he Chinese to use machine-spun rams in prefererce to the home hand-made article. TheTe is no doubt whatever that Japan must push throughout China, Manchuria, and Corea her trade ir 'tome-manufactured articles if she is to attain any commercial importance ; vi the matter of jams, however, it is 1 mistake to suppose that she is entirely dependent upon the Chinese market, as, roughly speaking, two-thirds of the production of the Japanese «ottoa -mills is reojjired locally. .
— Persons ■who visit the Royal Observatory at Greenwich must "satisfy the Astronomer-royal that they are- interested in astronomy.
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Otago Witness, Issue 2905, 17 November 1909, Page 65
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1,034MULTUM IN PARVO. Otago Witness, Issue 2905, 17 November 1909, Page 65
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