MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 3557, 16 May 1922, Page 45

MULTUM IN PARVO.

Every form of lamp for use in mines is based on the design of Sir Humprhey Davy, whose principle was that flames will not pass through wire gauze. With a voice ranging over five octaves, from one note higher than Madame Patti’s highest, to lower than the previous record bass, a 44-vear-old Viennese male singer has been attracting much notice. with 2,616,645 acres, has a population of only 82,446; Lanark, less than a quarter of this size, has now 1,539,307 inhabitants. Scavengers were originally officials who collected Scavage, a tax imposed in many English towns on all goods exposed for sale within their boundaries; this tax was prohibited by Henry VII. The railway which crosses the St. Gothard, one of the most famous Alpine passes, travels over 324 bridges of more than 32ft span, and through 80 tunnels, the main one of which is nine and a-quarter miles long. St. James’s Palace, London, stands on the site of, and derives its name from, a twelfth century leper hospital, which Henry VIII transformed into a manor-house; between 1698 and 1837 it was a Royal residence. Widow-burning, now virtually extinct in India, is said to exist still in parts of Africa; widows were immolated on the husband’6 funeral pyre as a sign of virtue, and also to provide the dead man with attendants in the next world. The smallest gold niece in the world is the gold franc, one of which was specially minted as a standard for the use of the League of Nations, and afterwards presented to Sir Eric Drummond. Many miles of concrete roads are being built in Minnesota (U.S.A.) at a cost of £15,600 a mile. These roads are largely for the use of tourists, and are wide enough for three motors to run abreast. During several months of each year some of the great rivers of Siberia are frozen solid to the bottom, but the fishes imprisoned in the ice maintain their vitality and resume their active life when the ic© melts in the spring. —lt is said that the telescope was first introduced by a Dutch spectacle-maker. His children, whilst playing in the shop one day, casually placed a concave and convex 'glass together in such a position that by looking through them at the weathercock it appeared much larger and nearer. -—ln the business area of San Francisco the names of the streets are shown by hollow cast-iron boxes, built into the kerb, according to Everyday Science. The inside of the back of the box is painted white, and the name is punched in holes on the face. At night an electric light inside the box makes the name visible San Francisco, built in rectangular blacks, is easy enough for the stranger to find his way about in. London is a puzzle to every newcomer,* and the City Corporation andL.C.O. might well be more generous to tile stranger, especially at night. Ping-pong, which seems to be growing extremely popular again, was invented about 40 years ago, when, according to tradition, someone started playing it with cigar-box lids for bats and champagne corks fc-r balls (observes a Daily Chronicle writer). The credit of developin'- it into a game, however, belongs to Mr James Gibb, who some 10 years later introduced celluloid balls and drew up and published the rules. Gossima, as he called it, failed to catch on for some years, but in 1960 a change of name“ and the introduction of seamless xylonite balls set all the world playing ping-pong. The craze was as brief as it was violent, and after two decades of neglect it is now being rediscovered, apparently, by a new generation. Doctors in America are reported to be reviving the use of leeches which figured so largely among old therapeutic measures. There are not enough leeches on the market to supply the demand, which is apparently growing, since some physicians seem to have found that few better methods of relieving inflammatory areas exist than the application of these creatures. The leech belongs to the blood-letting days. Its modern use, however, is probably more as a counter-irritant than as a remover of blood. It is a kind of animated mustard plaster and surgeon’s knife combined, and its efforts, or so those who believe in it declare, result in a marked relief of tension and a rapid subsidence of inflammatory mischief. The country most faithful to the leech is the United States, where it ia still much used. But England (a writes- in the Montreal Witness says) is becoming a better buyer. An authority of wide experience has declared that there has been a “small boom” just recently, and that some chemists could easily dispose of double the number they are able to buy. Tins difficulty of supply is largely due to the fact that the old leech “farms” have disappeared. These farms had ponds into which old horsee were made to walk at stated intervals in order to feed the “stock.” Now leeches are fished for and exported in baskets from Turkey and other areas. Paris has one leech farm with sales of about 130,000 per month. Seventy years ago Livingstone, the explorer, told a tale of a “rain tree,” which he found showering down liquid from the tips of its leaves at the rate of a quart in about a,n hour. He did not at that time know- the cause of the phenomenon; but another traveller, who was also a botanist (Dr Sharp) discovered that the so-called rain trees of tropical regions belonged to many different families, and that the cause was not of vegetable origin at all, but was the w-ork of a.n insect. Most gardeners—especially carnation growers—are familiar with tho little green insect with bright eyes called a frog hopper or cukoo spit. It is, in fact, a kind of aphis, and it has developed a remarkable protective adaptation in the formation of the “spit. 1 ' This is the sap of the young plant, worked up by the insect, who sucks it up through a long, sharp mouth-organ so greedily that tho surplus oozes through his delicate skin. This overflowing fluid is then wrought into a froth bv the creature’s lashing “tail,” which injects a bubble of air in the process. The whipped-up liquid finally surrounds the insect’s body and acts as a veil. This is precisely what goes on in the ease of the rain trees. The insects of the tropical countries are also of the aphis order, but much larger and probably more numerous, bo that their attack upon a tree causes the strange —and sometimes actually beneficent —result known as “rain.” One tree which is especially sought after is called Ttyelus goudoti (or “weeping”); and it has been estimated that a small group of these would produce sevor.J gallons of liquid in a. night.