MULTUM IN PARVO

Otago Witness, Issue 3337, 27 February 1918, Page 47

MULTUM IN PARVO

The -British National Relief Fund has reached £6,301,172. Of this sum £3,728,472 has been allocated to date for distribution for relief With one exception, all babies born in St. -Albans Workhouse Infirmary last year have been boys. Over 16 municipal tramway undertakings throughout Britain employ women drivers, Glasgow iakmo having 220 of thein. Nearly 20,000 British tiouth African natives have been recruited for service behind the lines in Franco and Flanders. Close oa 10,000 workshops in Great Britain are engaged in the -production _of munitions, of which 5000 are controlled and 150 are national factories. Tho colloction of hair among tho •women of Munich, organised by the German Navy League, has realised over 3001 b weight. The hair is used for driving belts in U-boat machinery. The largest fortune in the world is still that belonging to the B/Othsohild family. It. is estimated at two billion dollars, and is supposed to bring the living members of the family an income of 200,000d0l a day. —Of 350 claims for British Government relief for air raid damago the smallest is for 5s for a doll's dress, and the largest for £290 for furniture. One victim claims for the death of a monkey. A surgical glove has been invented which will enable a man who ha* lost the use of the tendons in the back of the hand to be able to write just as well as if he had those tendons there. The amount raised by means of gift sales alone in farming districts of England for the Agricultural .Relief of Allies Fund is now over £IOO,OOO. That former arch-apostle of Pacificism, Mr W. J. Bryan, is credited with remarking : "I was once a Pacificist. But I eay now, 'Let us all get together and fight like the devil!'" . , The Jordan has hitherto been cited as the most crooked stream in the world. But it is surpassed in this respect by tho ■White River, Arkansas, ' which journeys 1000 miles in traversing a distance of 30 miles as tho crow flies. The Danube is the second river in Europe, inferior only to tho Volga. -It is 1725 miles long, drains 315,360 square miles, and carries tour-fifths of the commerce of Eastern Europe. —To meet the demand of Uncle Sam's newspaper-reading public about 1,775,000 tons of paper are consumed annually. Before the war, £14,000,000 was sufficient to oover. the cost, but during the last six months this has been increased to £27,000,000. Specimens of 21 out of 29 medals issued in Germany during the present war have been presented to the British Museum. They include, a large cast-iron medal representing an air attack on London in August, 1915, with Zeppelins over the Tower bridge. ' • The question has been asked: "What becomes of the breweries in the States of America that go dry?" One has just become a malted-milk factory; several are cold-storage warehouses; one is an artificial ioe plant; another a vinegar factory; another a grape-juice factory. A yeast factory is still another; while one brewery has become a hospital, and still another has become a church I A horse in the parlour of a palace was a yearly rite in Russia "in other days" on New Year's Day. The peasants on an estate would groom and harness the finest horse, generally a white one, on the place; lots -would be cast for the one to ride it, and then horse and rider would go to tho house, drive through the door and hall into the principal room, where the master of the estate and his family would be in waiting. The greatest gambler in modern times was probably Mr Ernest Benzon ("the Jubilee Plunger"), who squandered a fortune of a quarter of a million in two years. Ho is said to have lost £30,000 in a single night's play at Goodwood. At Sandown he dropped £15,000 on one day's racing, and increased his losses to £25,000 by a few hours' unluoky card-playing the same evening ; while on one occasion ho lost £IO,OOO at ohemin de' fer in 10 minutes. During November increases of wages were granted to 170,000 work people, amounting to over £30,000 per week (says the British Labour Gazette). In tho 11 months ending November 4,332,000 people received additional wages, amounting to a sum of £1,507,500'a week. Of this sum some £900,000 is about equally divided between the coal-miners and the engineers and shipbuilders The word "camouflage," which is a war addition to the English language, is also comparatively new in French. It was not used by our Allies until this war. It is derived from "camouflet," which originally meant, "smoke puffed in the face of a Bleeping person," and afterwards came to mean mystification. "Camouflage" is military mystification, the disguising of guns and military positions so that they may escape the enemy's observation. Many Camouflage schemes are adopted at the front. One of tho things Earl Reading was shown when in Washington was tho huge stock of gold in the vaults of the United States Treasury. A corridor in the basement, through which little iron-wheeled trucks used to roll, has been shut off by steel gates, and the gold is stacked up for all the world like bricks awaiting the bricklayer's hand. In that one pile is-iJ2OO tons of pure gold, much of i't representing British coins sent to Washington in payment of war supplies, and melted down in tho assay office next door. Each brick is worth approximately £I6OO, and the pile is valued at more than £150,000,000. During the South African war no fewer than 50,000 soldiers died from tvphoid. Those who remember tho casualty-lists of that day will how the impurities of tho water-supply in South Africa were far more deadly than the b'.illets of the Boers, and how terribly Lord Roberts's army suffered during tho long halt at Bloemfontein. In the present war out of tho millions of British soldiers who have served in France only 3000 have, fallen victims to typhoid. The statistics, of course, from Salonika and GSallipoli, where the normal sanitary conditions in peace time are much worse, would be decidedly less favourable; but even in those places there has, happily, been no parallel to the old epidemics of dysentery and cholera which, in previous campaigns, have reduced strong armies to absolute inaction in a few weeks.