MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 4066, 16 February 1932, Page 67

MULTUM IN PARVO.

—Londoners are among the healthiest people in England, the general death rate of Jihe metropolis having fallen to 11.7 per

—A single man with an income of £250 pays income tax in Great Britain of £l2 10s; in France he has to pay the equivalent of £l5 2s.

—Miss Katherine Plunket has kept her 111th birthday in Ireland, and Miso Rachel Pitt, whose father fought at Waterloo, has kept her 104th in Scotland. T ? arrier Pigeon landed at Long Island from Venezuela after flying 2000 miles over mountains, sea, and forest. —Thousands of acres of forest land in Canada have been turned over to the Canadian Boy Scouts to re-forest and to protect as wild-life preserves.

—Sparrows are said to do damage to the extent of about £3OOO to the grape crop in one province of the Argentine.

The sum of £855 was received by Canon J. N. Bateman-Champain, who remained for 12 hours outside St. Nicholas Cathedral, Newcastle-on-Tyne, collecting lunds to save the building from the ravages of the death-watch beetle. —Councillor George Green, of Carlton near Nottingham who travelled more than 2,000,000 miles during 40 years’ service as a London and North-Eastern Railway guard, has retired.

—*4- £22,000 consignment of British motor lorries and cars which was shipped from London for New Zealand repre* sentea part of the Dominion’s' purchases from England in return for the Homelands purchases of Empire butter. —A woman guest at the dinner of the British Institute of Radiology, London, declined to e it at a table where 13 places had been laid, and a rearrangement of seats was made.

—Apart from season ticket holders, the British railways did 3.3 per cent, less passenger work in July of last year than in 1930. This represents a loss of £3,616,554.

—The career of the White Star liner Corinthic, which never had a mishap during her 29 years at sea, ended recently, when Sir Thomas Wilford, High Commissioner for New Zealand, hauled down her flag at the Royal Albert Dock, London.

—Women in Chicago who would be really smart must have their lips harmonising with or matching their frocks. For instance, with a dress of wine colour, the lips of the wearer should be deep red.

—British chimneys emit over 9,000,000 tons of smoke annually, about one-third of this being due to domestic fires. —On medical orders 4,760,000 milk meals and 776,000 “oil meals” were served in British elementary schools last year.

—Wheels are fitted to a tiny one-man submarine designed by its American inventor to cruise along the bed of the ocean like a motor car. It can also travel on the surface of or under the water.

—By installing a huge water-softening plant, which will deal with the 4,000,000,000 gallons of water used annually in their locomotives, the L.M.S. Railway expect to reduce their upkeep costs and coal consumption. -—More than 7,000,000 men and women served under the British flag during the Great War; of these 4.500,000 are still living.

—Cats are evidently popular in the United States, where, it is estimated, there are 120,000,000; of this total New York has 7,000,000. —Among the “immoralities” of modern life recently condemned by the Roman Catholic bishops of Zagreb, Serbia, are “mixed bathing (especially on Sundays), mixed ' hiking,’ football matches, theatres, kinemas, fetes, and dances.” —Tn only five marriages out of the 315,109 contracted in England and Wales in 1930 were the brides and grooms of the same age.

—The average hardness of water in England is 15 degrees, although there are places where it rises as high as 25 degrees.

—Children get married in Egypt, where there are 152 husbands and 687 wives all under 10 years of age. Of these child wives 60 are widows. —Professional letter-writers still write the love letters for the young men of Barcelona, who can, for twopence, make a choice from a number of specimen proposals.

—A new “sports” Ministry created by the Jugoslavia Cabinet will bear the title of Ministry of Physical Training. —lt was announced at a recent meeting of the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society, England, that the War Office had intimated its readiness to grant £BOOO to the Hunters’ Society for light horse breeding for the current year instead of discontinuing it as at first proposed. —A Chinese lacquer cabinet measuring only 42 inches fetched £409 10s at Christie’s, London.

—The_ Obeervatore Romano, the official organ of the Vatican, states that university professors who are Roman Catholics may take the Fascist oath of allegiance, which is a pledge to the Italian Government and not to a political party. —Drilling the teeth may become unnecessary if a recent German invention is successful. By this new method the affected tooth is enclosed in a case with the decayed portion exposed. On this a few drops of acid is dropped, and in a few minutes the decayed portion is removed painlessly. —One-eighth of the total cotton crop is destroyed every year by the bollweevil in the United States, where insects do damage to the annual value cf £400,000,000. —People who borrow books and fail to 1 return them have been christened ‘ booksneaks ” by the publishers of New York, who chose this name from thousands of suggestions. —An aeroplane with a male pilot has reached an altitude of 43,000 feet, and with a woman pilot 32,500 feet.