MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 3888, 18 September 1928, Page 75

MULTUM IN PARVO.

—By the end of the year £2,000,000 of the new British coinage will be in circulation. —A Bill is before the British Parliament to prohibit the importation of'British Legion poppies from Germany. —The Boy Scouts of St. Mary Magdalene Church, in Southwark, England, have, made a flagstaff for the church. —The London General Omnibus Company made a record by carrying 6,000,000 passengers on a recent Saturday. —On the Riviera the weather of the past season has been the worst for—five years, being both windy at*d wet. —Over 500 seals have been destroyed in the Wash, near Boston, England, in two years. r —Over 700,000 people visited Madame Tussaud’s, London, in the first week of its reopening. —ln a seven-roomed house in Lambeth, London, are seven -people whose average age is over 77. —Colchester, England, is giving up tarms for motor buses. t, —A rather unexpected result of the British military occupation of the Rhineland has been the development of women police in Germany. —-Snapshots in natural colours may be possible if a new type of roll film, shortly to be put on the English market, comes up to its inventor’s claims. —The English Southern Railway is losing nearly half a million pounds a year through bus competition. —Strawberries gathered in Holland have lately been sold in London the same day, being brought by aeroplane. —Hywel Dda paid £63 a year tribute to England 1000 years ago, and in return won the independence of Wales. —A new metal is being made in Germany, called electron metal, which is said to be 40 per cent, lighter than aluminium. —The Turkish Government has decided to use the Latin characters for the Turkish alphabet instead of the old Arabic script. —Mr W. Robinson, of Mansfield Woodhouse, Englatid. though 91, still teaches a Sunday school class, and has never been late for 60 years. —Richard Catt, who did not believe in banks, had on him his life’s savings, £l5O, in Treasury notes when he was killed by a fall from a ladder at Hastings, England. —A little boy .in Glamorgan, Wales, was saved from death by his sister throwing herself in front of him as a motor lorry came dashing along. His sister died. —At one of the largest pheasant farms in England, on the borders of Sussex and Hampshire, 5000 hen pheasants are kept in captivity, and at least 150,000 eggs are sold every year. —Two of the worst poverty areas in the London of 30 years ago were in Westminster and near Great Queen street, | Kingsway. A new survey is being taken to see which are the worst spots now. —A new apparatus, the invention of a Frenchman, for telephoning and telegraphing by wireless to an aeroplane in flight, has been tried in France. A pilot was in constant communication with half a dozen radio stations during a flight of 375 miles.

—The next international jamboree to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of Scouting is to be held at Arrowe Park, near Birkenhead, in August 1929. —lt was a boundary feud between Germany and France and the slow blood feud which plunged the world into the Great War, said Mr Lloyd George. —A Scottish investigation committee has given its opinion that the Scout and Guide movements of Great Britain have greatly reduced juvenile crime. —Metallised linen, a new fabric, may bring about a complete change in the construction of aircraft. It has a tensile strength of over 18001 b per foot width, and is very light. An aeroplane half the present weight, yet considerably stronger, could be constructed from such a fabric, while petrol tins for an Atlantic flight could be made of metallised material lighter than the thinnest aluminium. —

—The average height of human beings is sft sin. The tallest group are the Australians, 6ft I’n, and the shortest the African Negrillos, 4ft 3in, and the Eskimos. ‘•According to Dr R. Bennett Bean, a professor of anatomy, who has analysed the measurements of 1022 groups of people of five continents, nutrition fixes the stature of races. People living near the sea get too much iodine and tend to short stature; inland people tret lime, which makes for long bones. The lack of nourishment in the equatorial and Arctic zones keeps those people short. People who live in the fertile temperate zones have more and better food, and therefore grow taller. —Coloured photographs taken with an ordinary film camera at moderate cost may soon be possible for amateur photographers. The photographs are taken in an ordinary camera on three special films placed together in a “ pack ” forming a three-ply film. These are separated and developed, three black-and-white negatives, suitable for printing off ordinary photographs, being obtained. Each negative is printed separately on specially prepared cellulose tissue, giving the primary colours —yellow, red, and blue. The printing is done in daylight or arclight in the usual way. The yellow, red, and blue prints are then fixed one on top of the other with gelatine solutions, and the photograph is finished. Any number of prints may be taken from the negatives.

—The “whitewash special” is a mysterious train which travels on the main lines of the Great Western Railway, yet does not appear in any time-tables and never stops to pick up passengers. Its duty is to search for bumps on the permanent way, and runs are made from Paddington to such places as Plymouth and Newport. The coaches consist of rolling stock of various kinds fitted with different bogies. An observer stands over each bogie, and when he feels the slightest jolt he releases a splash of whitewash on the track, as a guide that the spot needs attention. Various coloured washes are used, such as green, red. white, blue, and yellow, each signifying a different kind of bogie. A machine in the back of the train makes a graph of all the jolts, and on the return journey stops are made to examine the line where wash has been dropped. Experts then take measurements and notes for future repairs.