MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 3755, 2 March 1926, Page 57

MULTUM IN PARVO.

The giraffe has a tongue almost 18in long. Flour sprinkled ou burning oil will at once extinguish it. The mace is a heavy gilt club, surmounted by a crown. J was worth only 73s in gold. The last use of shields in civilised warfare was at Culloden in 1745. A full-grown elephant can carry three tons on his back. A camel can carry twice the burden of an ox, or 4001 b. Royal trains rarely travel faster than 34 miles an hour. A horse has 40 teeth, 24 being grinders, 4 tusks, and 12 front teeth town in the American colonies. Epping Forest is the largest public recreation ground in the world. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animats was founded ra 1824. The oldest known English picture is one of Chaucer, painted on panel in the year 1380. dwellers upon the earth are habitual users of tobacco. Norfolk pays the lowest farm wages in England—29s a week in summer .and 28s in winter. The record frequently of lightning flashes in England is 25 to the minute. A doctor states that tight, unventilated hats are one of the chief causes of baldness. A young fox and the dog that caught it cat from the same dish at Plymouth, England. Powdered rice is said to bo of great efficacy in checking bleeding from cuts and bruises. Charles Dickens, in his 24 works, introduces us to no fewer than 1425 personages. A ship in St. John's Ilarbour, Newfoundland, has brought in 1,000,000 seals since it began its work. There is salt enough in the sea to cover 7,000,000 square miles of land with a layer one mile in thickness. The Scott Monument at Edinburgh is 200 ft high, and was erected in 1844. It is designed to imitate Melrose Abbey. A fire which broke out in a Roumanian oilfield is expected to last for several years, as no method of extinguishing it has been discovered. --Clerks in the Bank of England formerly worked six whole days a week, and had to be content with no holidays, save a few special days scattered through the year. Crabs travel quite considerable distances. One marked specimen, liberated in Start Bay, ‘Devonshire, was later recaptured GO miles away by Land s End fishermen. Out of 81,000 visitors who signed the official album at the birthplace ot William Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon, 32,000 were from the touted Kingdom and 14,160 from America. The first photograph to lie permanently fixed was made 100 years ago by a Frenchman, Niepee, although some yeais earlier Thomas Wedgwood, an Englishman, had obtained images which were not shown in London depicted the Isle of Wight as seen from the air. The size of this photograph can be judged from the fact that it covered an area of 150 square miles at a scale of Sin to the mile. « , , , , Extensive tests are stated to have proved that short sight, or myopia, is neither caused nor increased by reading or any other form of near work. —o* the tobacco consumed by the smokers of Great Britain, only one-sixth produced in the British Empire although Empire tobacco is growing m P °—”lpictorca “painteiT entirely with the juices of flowers have been exhibited in London. The colours are obtained by rubbing the flower petals across the paper. Ostrich feathers have so lost their popularity that these birds are now being killed in South Africa for their skins and flesh. Of the former light shoes are be - nS ln’Kashmir, where the temperature is often as low as 20 degrees below zero, the poorer people keep themselves warm by carrying a howl full of hot embers under their one and only garment. A 22-year-old mare, borrowed to make a journey from one Lincolnshire village to another, was put into a nelu for the night, and the next morning was found back home, having walked in the dark 15 miles over unknown roads.. Excessive tea-drinking is assigned as the chief cause of the high rate ot insanity in some parts of Ireland, ana the theory would seem to be strengthened by the fact that there are three iemalfl lunatics to one male in these places. A good railway engine will travel about 1,000,000 miles before it wears out. The life- of an engine depends as to its length upon the treatment it receives, but, with ordinal y service, it ought to last 12 years. -- At a small village named Allesley, in England, the church bell is rung at 5 o'clock every morning in summer and b o’clock in winter, in order to arouse lie-a-beds and enable them to start work in good time. The curfew bell is also tolled at 8 o'clock each evening. Cinderella’s real name, it is alleged, was Rhodope. She is believed to have been a beautiful Egyptian maiden, who lived 070 years before the common era and during the reign of Psamoticus, ono of the 12 kings of Egypt. There is only one English variety of poisonous serpent —the adder or viper. It may be discriminated from the other English serpents by its thicker and shorter formation, flatter head, dull colour, and rather sluggish movements.

The poppy has been found to have the valuable property of binding with its roots the soil in which it grows in such a manner that it will prove most valuable in supporting embankment*. On the Continent railway embankments me frequently sown with poppies.