MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 3102, 27 August 1913, Page 59

MULTUM IN PARVO.

•—Ten men commit suicide to one woman. St. Paul s Cathedral, Loudon, is insured for PoOO,IKaJ. The County of Anglesey has 42 parishes without a punnc-nouse. Britain owns ibU,UOO miles of ocean cables; tiermany 10,uu0 mites. A farst-ctass ocean steamer requires the services of about 1141) firemen. A i\ew York clubaouse tor workpeople is fitted with electric batns. .Ninety-five climbers are known to have lost their lives on tne Alps during the year m 2. The world’s coffee crop is 800,000 tons, and America drinks one-tmrd of this. There are at least 100 species of oysters known to scientists. English County Court judges each receive an anuuai salary of £looo. About 1000 servants are attached to King George s Royal household. The entertainment of Royalty costs British society each year fully ±12,0b0,000. Smoking is permitted in prisons in Belgium as a reward for good behaviour. Taxes amounting to over one million sterling are collected every week at Somerset Bouse, London. —No woman can be sent to prison for debt. Thousands of men are committed each year. Prince Arthur of Connaught had an ambition as a small boy to become a ciockmakcr. Japanese men are among the best needle-workers in the world, their only equals being the women of Russia. The deoris left from coral made into articles of jewellery, etc., is crushed, seemed, and sold as tooin-powder at a h.gh price by Indian periumers. Over iOau men to one woman are engaged m • dangerous callings —occupations entailing risk ot deatn. Electrified cheese is the latest invention from Rotterdam, and it is ciauned tnai any taste desired can be given by electric action. Airs Edison, tne wue of tne lamous inventor, was once empoyeu as a typist and stenographer in her husband s otliee. A new type of London general motoromnibus nas six cross-oencries inside and ordinary siue-seats at the entrance. Barely one person in K/U of the inhabitants of tne Limed Kingdom own more than an acre-of land. The screw ot an Atlantic liner revoives something like bdO,tMJ times between Liverpool and New York. , ihe number of tnose unable to read or write in Portugal is estimated to be about VO per cent, oi the entire population. Bouses round Ascot used to Jet for race week at otXJgs to 4UUgs. Now people motor to tne course ana safe the cost of expensive lodgings. The title admiral derives its origin from an Arabic word, ernir-al-bahr, meaning ’■ lord of the sea.’’ Deaths m England and Wales due to phthisis have decreased in number during the past half-century by nearly bO per cent. worked on tile average during the last 10 years 5.24 days per week. Dahlias were originally discovered in Mexico, the tiower being introduced into England towards the enu of the eighteenth century. Telegraph wires will last for 40 years near the seasnorc; but in the manufacturing districts of England the same wires will last only 10 years, and sometimes less. is a public oven, where for a small fee housewives may have their dinners and suppers cooked for them. The wife of an attorney in Chicago, while drinking an oyster cocktail, found a pearl. It was taken to a jeweller’s, polished, and valued at £240.

Bloodhounds arc not naturally cruel. Their mission is to track a fugitive, not injure. Those whom'they follow are rarely, if- ever, torn or injured by the pursuing hounds.

The largest elephant tusks known weigh 1981 b and 1741 b respectively. They were both taken from the same elephant. The scarcity of elephants in India may bo inferred from the fact that in 1835 one of those animals could bo bought there for £45; now the price has advanced to £BOO.

Good champagne corks cost from three-ponce-halfpenny to fivonenco apiece. They must bo absolutely flawless, and are cut by hand from the best quality of bark.

Some of the wooden churches of Norway are fully 7<X) years old, and are still in an excellent state of preservation. Their timbers have successfully resisted the frosty and almost Arctic winters, because they have been repeatedly coated with tar.

Robert Sams, a farm labourer, has died at Castle Hedingham, Essex, in his hundredth year. Me married at the age of 25, anti brought up a family of seven on a wage of eight shillings a week. Among the lots sold in a Paris auction room recently were:—Petrified body of a Patagonian slain in battle several thousand years ago, £328; head of Indian cut off in battle, £53; two books, one bound in the skin of a white woman, the other in the skin of a negross, £2O. The nine-hundredth anniversary of the oak-walled parish church of Grecnstoad, near Ongar, Essex, has just boon celebrated. The church, which is built of split oak trees, is the only one of its kind in the country, and bids fair to last another 900 years.

The Germans make underclothing of the fibre of the pine needles, while knitting and darning yarns, cork soles, quilts, wadding, pine candle soap, incense, and oven cigars made from the same material have been exported from Germany for years. Herman Koppes, 14 years old, the youngest life prisoner who has ever entered the Illinois State Penitentiary, has just begun his term. Koppes murdered a woman and her two little children on her farm, where he was employed. At the prison ho was given his first shave and first pair of long trousers. The wife of Herr Ottmann. a well-to-do manufacturer at Schonthal, Bavaria, has given birth to seven children within 14 months (says the Daily Mail’s Berlin correspondent). In April, ISI2. four girls were born to her at the same time, and recently she gave birth to triplets, all three boys. An American woman recently died from blood-poisoning resulting from her thumb being scratched by h piece of pineapple which she was peeling. Twelve hours after the incident the hand began to swell, and the swelling extended gradually through the arm. She was taken to a hospital, but the poison had spread through her system, and the physicians could not save her life.

Raindrops aro, as a rule, larger in summer than in winter. The size of a raindrop when it reaches' the earth depends on the height from which it has fallen. In the summer the lower strata of air aro warmer than in winter, and therefore clouds are formed at a greater height, where conditions are favourable for rapid condensation. The drops falling from these high summer clouds have more time to grow, and therefore become larger than those falling from the lower winter clouds.