MULTUM IN PARVO

Otago Witness, Issue 3418, 19 September 1919, Page 53

MULTUM IN PARVO

Bathrooms would cost £SO extra per cottage ill rural housing schemes. Pigeons have been known to fly 600 miles in continuous flight in 10 hours. Napoleon's first finger was longer than his middle finger—one of the few cases on record. Common house sparrows fly at the rate of 72 .miles an hour. Tho intrinsic value of a shilling in 1914 was 4d. To-day it is worth lo£d. Rat? cause damage to the extent of £30,000.000 annually in the United Kingdom. Fifteen yea- - s ago our Consulate at Buenos Aires was in the back room of a boot-repairing fvhop. Coti'ee is clearer to-day in tho United States than during the past 30 years. —Out of 22 ambulance trains for use in Englan:!, only eight are still employed. .Four-hundred pounds a year and a house is the minimum salary suggested for clergymen. . Diamonds worth £20,000 have been obtained in two months on a farm in the Orange Free State. The world's most crooked river is tho Jordan. It wanders nearly 220 miles in order to cover 60 miles. —An inch of falling rain on an acre of land would fll more than COO barrels of 45gal each. Twelve thousand bombs, weighing 553 tons, were dropped altogether by the Independent Force, R.A.F. ■ The Government is subsidising important industries, etc., to the extent of £184,000 003 a year. Live lobsters were the first merchandise carried by the now air service between Paris and Brussels. The bloater is the most nutritious form of fish food, in which respect the haddock equals the more exclusive sole. Skimmed is better value, from the food point of view and considering the price asked for it, than "whole" milk." One hundred and fifty marriages take place every week, it is estimated, between Australian soldiers and British women. Last year 6,000,0C0 pairs of stockings were made in tho United States from silk manufactured from wood pulp, The Danube flows through countries in which 52 languages and dialects are spoken. It is 2000 miles in length. Girls have grown bigger during the war; Waists now measure 2pin and 2Sin, while size 7£ in gloves and sizes 7 and 8 in boots are sold. The first pillar-box in London was placed in Fleet street in 1655. In this respect the Channel Islands, France, and Germany were ahead of us. A Belgian-made glass tumbler which cost Id before the war is now lOd. An English tumbler of better quality has risen from Ud in 1914 to 9d to-day. Although birds_ build nests, these are only used for breeding. Thousands of birds are killed by the cold each winter because thoy have no real homing sense._ Cotheridge, a remote village in Worcestershire, has been without a vicar for six months; tho last incumbent was his own clerk, bellringer, and church-cleaner. There is a man's town on the borders of Russia. It is the Asiatic town of Maimatchin. It is peopled by men only. Women are forbidden entrance. Horrible place! There are 1,600,000 beehives in Spain. Their production is estimated' at 28 million pounds of honey a year, valued roughly at 5,000,0C0d01, not including the value of the wax. The most curious church "in the world" is found at Bergen, Norway. _ It is built entirely of paper saturated with a concoction of unslaked lime, curdled milk, and the whites of thousands of eggs. The church seats 1000 persons. Just over 20 years ago the estimates for building were as follow:—"Cost of a workman's plain country cottage, 3d_ per cubio foot. Ordinary semi-detached eijrht or 10 roomed house, 8d or 9d per cubic foot. Mansions. 2s a cube foot and sometimes more. These sums did not include cost of land or fencing." "Drawing room" is an abbreviation of "withdrawing room," which was originally tho apartment in a house to which the ladies withdrew from the hall, which was the usual living and dining room. _ The custom of withdrawing after dinner is _ derived from the Norsemen, for the Vikings always dismissed women from their drinking bouts. , • The owl has no motion in tho eye, the globe of which is immovably fixed in its socket by a strong, elastic, hard, cartilaginous case; but, in order to compensate for the absence of motion in the eye, tho owl is ab!e to turn its head round in almost a completo circle without moving its body. A quarter of a century ago, in England, 233 families lived in houses which paid over'£looo per annum in rent; 9214 families paid between £SOO and £IOOO rent a year; 8633 families between £2OO and £500; 101,948 families paid between £SO and £IOO a year in rent; and 3,624,608 families_ paid less than £2O a- year for the houses in which they lived. ' ' The Marquis of Bute, once the possessor of numerous collieries in the South Wales coalfield, has sold his last remaining pits to Mr I. R, Llewellyn, of _ Aberdare. These collieries are situated at Hirwin, near Aberdare, and have an output of about 350 tons a day. Excellent fresh veins of coal havo been tested, and proved to be satisfactory, and no time is to be lost in opening ,out these seams. —-'One of the most exclusive clubs in Pall Mall attains its centenary this year. This is the Travellers', which is five years older than the dignified Athenaeum and several years older than the aristocratic Car'toji. On tho other hand, it is not quite so old ns the Guards' or the United Service Club. The Travellers' Club, which has a membership of some 800. mostly well-known figures in society, polities, arts, and literature, has traditions all its_ own which have been consistently maintained through al'i the century of its existence. A hostess pointed out to me one night this week, says a writer in the London Evening News, the marks of lighted cigaretto ends on satinwood furniture, and also on her carpets. "It used to bo tho now boy officers who seemed never to have known that thero.are such things as ashtrays," she Said. But* lately one has noticed that girls who smoke aro quite as careless. Anent this growing custom of people of both sexes smoking in ballrooms one recalls a terse, but very much to the point, notice that was posted up in a ballroom in Calcutta years ago. It reads: "Gentlemen will not smoke in tho ballroom, others will not be allowed to." Thero wero no offenders that night.