MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 3912, 5 March 1929, Page 74

MULTUM IN PARVO.

. —An official report states that 500 kinds of material are used for mens shoes. —Church bells are tuned by chipping the edge till the proper note is obtained. —The cost of firing a triple-turret salvo in the case of H.M.S. Nelson is about £7OO. „

—Nervous diseases are much more prevalent among brain workers than among other sections of the community. —Doctors have a much higher mortality rate than either lawyers or clergymen.

•—Police Constable Giggins, of Wickford, Essex, won the prize in a local beauty competition for men. —lt takes about 15 months to season and dry the wood used in making matches by the ordinary process. —ln the 12 months ended September 30 101,791 houses were completed in England with State assistance. Of these 59,220 were built by local authorities. —Manufacturers of all kinds of goods from steel gates to jewellery now send their representatives to the London museums to study the exhibits and get new ideas. —Pillow-phones, which enable wireless music to be heard by those laying their heads on them, have been installed at the Liverpool (England) Open-air Hospital for Children. •—An 181 b golden carp, 29in long, caught in Leicester Pool, near Hinckley, England, was believed to be a hundred fears old. —Broken china, collected over a period of 20 years, forms the material of a wonderful grotto, sft high, in a cottage garden at Feltham, Middlesex. —A. beauty parlour is to be installed at a Jersey city hospital for the insane, for experience has proved that when insane patients have their personal appearance improved this beautifying also improves their mental condition. A course in beauty culture will be given to the nurses at the hospital so that they can administer it to patients. —Cows have been painted vivid colours by the farmers of Westchester County, New York, in an attempt to protect them from amateur hunters. Every year several hundred head of cattle are mis-

taken for deer, and for every deer shot - probably a dozen cows are killed. By painting the cows in bright green and red stripes they hope that hunters, seeing the animals so marked, will have definite assurance that, whatever the apparitions confronting them- may be, tliey are not deer. —Mud is the latest source of electrical supply. A power station is being erected at Karnap, Germany, which will depend on the mud of the river Eras. This contains a combustible material which, by a new method, will be extracted and dried, and then used as fuel for the works. The heat value is stated to approximate lignite. The new process is described as of international importance, since there are many rivers in the various coal districts throughout the world where mud could be treated and used in the same manner.

—There are only 3600 veterinary surgeons in Great Britain, but at least 7000 unqualified people practise there as animal doctors, very many of them totally lacking either knowledge or experience. —Four giant airships have been ordered by the United States Navy Department. They will have a cruising radius of 9000 miles, a speed of over 72 knots an hour, and each will carry five aeroplanes. Although a tablet on a London tavern states that Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, was born in a house on that site, there is a doubt about it. No one knows definitely whether he was born in London or in a Huntingdonshire town. — The _ oldest lens known was ’ discovered in the ruins of Nineveh. Its magnifying power must have been noticed, but it was probably used not as a microscope, but as a burning glass. The lens as an aid to vision dates only from the Middle Ages.

—When he was six months old Mr Lauderdale Duncan, of Hove, England, crossed the Atlantic, and since "then’ with the exception of the war period, he has visited America every year. He is now 77, and returned from New York on his 140th crossing recently. . —Keep Saturday afternoons for exercise; avoid scratch meals and bolted food; take alcohol in small quantities and only with food; save a little time each day for good reading. These are some of the health rules given to young doctors by Sir Thomas Barlow, PhvsicianExtraordinary to the King. -—Platinum has slowly but steadily been ousting gold as the material for wedding rings. Its only drawback has been the exepense—it is more costly than gold Now, however, a new material, “white gold,’ which looks just like platinum, but can be bought at one-third the price, is making its appearance. It is obtained by adding alloys to ordinary gold. Apart weight, most people would have difficulty in telling “white gold” from platinum. The latter is one of the heaviest of metals. •‘ The story is told of a man who saw a rather discoloured paperweight at an auction. He picked it up was surprised at its weight, and bid for was knocked down to him for a shilling or so. He then had it examined, an . f° un d as he had expected from the weight—that it was platinum. The deal increased his bank balance by a good few pounds.

Plass is the glass that won’t break. It cannot yet be bought in the shops but Professor E. C. Baly, of Liverpool University, has blown it, and speaks with the authority of a first-class scientific man of its properties. Fifty years ago glass tumblers were sold in Liverpool which could be dropped on the floor without breaking (sometimes), and many kinds of toughened glass have been made since. But tho earliest kinds, and some of the later ones, had a disturbing knack of splintering into small pieces if they were, by any means chipped. Professor Baly’s glass is made by a new process, first invented by Dr Pollack of Austria, and now improved to a point at which it can be moulded into shape, and can be thrown on to a stone floor without doing anything worse than bounce. The burglar cannot cut t’ but the ultra-violet rays of sunlight can.