MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 3961, 11 February 1930, Page 65

MULTUM IN PARVO.

— Poultry farming is increasing so rapidly in Norway that that country is now exporting thousands of hundredweights of eggs every’ year, whereas 25,000 c-wt of eggs were imported in 1923. —Gramophone records of the voices of famous French singers, actors, statesmen, and other public people are stored away in a museum in Paris. The collection was begun 18 years ago. . New books were published last year in the United Kingdom at the rate of 46 for every day of the year, or 14,399 altogether.

lhe average age of the members of the present House of Commons is well below 50. It was 52 in the last Parliament.

Among the Port of London pilots are 195 -who earned more than £lOOO a piece last year.

A n "Eat More Eggs” campaign in Canada increased the annual coneumptiou by 125 eggs pel’ head of the population. —Darts and shove-ha’penny are becoming so popular among society folk that they are beginning to rival* bridge and billiards as pastimes. ' —proposed to form a British fechool of Archaeology in Iraq in memory ot Miss Gertrude Bell, who left £6OOO towards it) foundation. Boiled sweets are to be supplied to the women in poor-law institutions of Romford, England, to balance the tobacco given to the men. The "ration” is 4oz a week. —" Missing ” women and girls to the number of 15,000 ai e reported in Great Britain every year. The great majority <>f these, however, return home or are found within a few days. Decorating dinner tables for private parties is a well-paid business in New \ ork, the fees charged ranging from £4O to £2OO. Many firms of this sort earn, from £4OOO to £6OOO a year. —A message of nine words, “ May God bless a long, happy, and prosperous life,” was inscribed on a grain of rice sent from i Delhi museum to Mr F. O. Roberts, the British Minister of Pensions. If German insurance companies persist in their refusal to insure the Graf Zeppelin and its crew for a flight over the north polar regions, it is said that Dr Eckener, the commander, will approach British companies. lhe British Secretary’ of State for ar is to be asked whether he will consider the discontinuance of enforced attendance at church on Sunday mornings, ami that all soldiers shall be able to use their own discretion about attendance. —An unusual memorial to the officers

and men of the Royal Navy who worshipped in Portsmouth Cathedral has been placed in that church. It is a model of the Mary Rose, a famous man-of-war which sank off Southsea Castle some 400 years ago. — There will be 165 volumes of 500 pages each in the complete catalogue of printed books in the British Museum, which is about to be printed. It will appear at the rate of about 15 volumes a y’ear, and the cost of the work to subscribers will be about £5OO each. —Thousands of people saw 16 persons (one of them a woman) leap out of a big Sikorsky aeroplane at a height of 2000 ft and descend safely by parachutes at Roosevelt 1" ield, U.S.A. They emerged from the cabin door so rapidly that, as the silk parachutes opened, they’ formed an almost unbroken line. —One of the first films ever made by a medical association for exhibition to the general public was displayed before the clinical congress of the’ American College of Surgeons. The film has to do '\‘fh the prevention and cure of appendicitis, declared by some of the assembled surgeons to be one of the gravest dangers confronting the world to-day. Dr Edward Martin, a noted Philadelphia surgeon, stated that ” there were 27,000 deaths from appendicitis in America last year. Twenty-six thousand of these,” he declared, “ could have been prevented it the patient had received medical atteiv tion in time.”

—An American dealer has paid f 22.000 for the first. Gutenberg Bible. The Bible, which lias been bought for the New York National Library, had been hidden for 300 y ears in the library of a Polish count at Bydgose, in Western Poland. The Gutenberg Bible is so named after the German printer, who produced the edition about 1456. It was done with two columns to the page, and spaces for illuminated initials. At the sale in 1884 of Sir John Thorold’s library, a Gutenberg Bible fetched £3900.

—V) hat is believed to be the largest and heaviest cable ever made in England was taken for 12 miles from Bi imsdown to King George V dock, North Woolwich, recently, in a special train, a double-rail track being kept clear all the way. The cable, which is designed to carry 33.000 watts, was made at the Enfield Cable Works, and is being taken to Sydney, Australia. It is in five separate lengths, each 700 yards long and weighing 28 tons, each drum being lift in diameter. The special train consisted of an engine, a brake-van, and five wagons, anil the journey was made late at night to axoid traffic disturbance.

—Herr Heinrich Westphal, the “ father ’’ of the spring mattress, has celebrated his eightieth birthday’ in his little apartment in one of the great tenement buildings in the north of Berlin. The man who made it possible for the world to sleep in luxury himself lies in poverty’ and squalid discomfort, dependent for his maintenance on the charity of friends. Herr Westphal relates that the idea of the spring mattress came to him while he was lying wounded during the Franco-Prussian war on a hard hospital bed. He brought out his patent in 1871, and his first mattress was presented to Prince Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, who sent him in return a letter which Herr Westphal still treasures. The German inflation swept him off his feet and left him destitute, but Herr Westphal has not given up hope. The inventor of the world’s first mattress is now hard at work in his garret striving to perfect the world’s last mattrees, which, he says, will be so soft that it will never again be necessary for anyone to invent another design.