THE EDITOR'S SCRAP BOOK

Southland Times, Issue 19387, 10 September 1904, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE EDITOR'S SCRAP BOOK

- . ,} Intern-sting Gleanings from Various i Sources. Italy's judges have many trials. Over 100 of them have memorialised the Cabinet for an increase of salary, -hinting darkly at the possibilities of a striko. • • • Cape Town has doubled. The census in Cape Colony shows that "the population of its capital and suburbs numbers 160,179 an increase of 90,313 on the census of 1891. « • * ' Fanciers of goldfish tell us that the most costly and most beautiful of these come. -front China. The Derby winner among goldfish is the tiny brush-tail fish, specimens of which have recently sold for as much as £140 each, or about a hundred times their weight in gold. ft m m Hissing is not invariably an expression of dislike. In West Africa the natives hiss when they are astonished ; in tho New Hebrides when they see anything beautiful The Basutos applaud an orator in their ( assemblies by hissing at him, and the Japanese show their reverence by a hiss. • •' . • The late Shah of Persia presented a thimble to a lady whose guest he was for a few hours. In the words of the delighted recipient, it looked like. a cluster of glittering gems, which in reality it was, save for : the gold in which they were set. An. expert in precious stones valued this thimble at £1,500. . a• • » M. Dubois, in a " paper before the Academy of Science, Paris, shows that it is possible, by means of the liontgen rays, to examine the living oyster without in anyway injuring if, and to ascertain whether or not it contains a peai'l. If it contains only, a tiny pearl the oyster is returned, and is allowed to livo until the disease has develoDed a large pearl. ( 9, .• • From 1857-62 the British Navy had ft surveying party out in the China waters, and in a most interesting record of tiie mission written by Mr. W. Blakeney, H.N., under the title " Cathay and Cipango," we learn that one day he observed that Lieutenant-Com-mander (afterwards Captain) Arthur, of H.M.S. " Algerine," had anchored his ship in tlie bay on which Lu-shun-kou stood. This was the first foreign vessel , that hud ever entered the bay, which has ever since borne Arthur's name. « ft -a Who would have supposed during the Roign of Terror that a day would come when the guillotine would be used for a laudable purpose ? Yet this has just happened in Sweden, for a guillotine bos been erected in the market place at Gothenburg, where it is used daily for the purpose of decapitating chickens, ducks, and other domestic animals. The local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals is responsible for this novel step. Animals, it claims, may legitimately be used as food, but there is no reason why they, should suffer while dying, and the surest way to avoid such suffering is to employ a guillotine as an instrument of deathi ■■■ * • « n A masterpiece of Van Dyck's has just been discovered at Athens in rather curious circumstances. A sergeant in the Greek Ai my possessed an old painting which had belonged to his family for a hundred and fUty years, and which had always been attributed to Raphael. The sergeant asked a Greek painter to examine tlie painting, with the result that the picture was discovered to b. n genuine Van Dyck. The sergeant who luul heard of Raphael, but never of Vcn l)yi-k, was much disgusted until he was assn red of the value of the painting, which repres .nts Christ on the Cross, and was bought by an ancestor of its present owner, about the middle of the eighteenth century, from* a Jew merchant in Zante. ft ft A Says an English Exchange— The annual consumption of succulent bivalves is said lo be 500,000,000. This aggregation of oysters would _ turn the scale, it is estimated, at, 50,000' tobs. At fifteen pence per dozen their value would be £2,004,221. The oyster-swallowers of tho United Kingdom annually account for 3,000,000,000 of these palatable delicacies. Our American cousins dispose of four times that total within the same period. The biggest bivalves are found in Port Lincoln, in South Australia. They average about the size of a dinnerplate. A single oyster is voted sufficient for a meal down there. A lover of the curious tells us that in a certain district on Chesapeake Bay, an oyster forms the regular subscription to a daily newspaper." ■ a * Spain, at one time by far the most powerful of European nations, was the earliest power to contract; a national debt, which in 1556, only amounted to the modest sum of one million pounds. By 1610 it had grown to £40,000,000 under Philip 111., after whose death the whole of it was repudiated. France, in 1643, began to incur hei* debt, chiefly through the wars of Louis XIV., and the lavish expenditure in building Versailles. In the later years of Louis XVI. this amounted to £468,000,000, only to be repudiated on the establishment of the Republic, when some creditors, received thirty-three per cent., and others nothing. Great Britian's debt began in the reign of William III'., and in 1713 was only £54,000,000. By 1889 the national debts of the world had run up to the enormous total of six thousand one." hundred and sixty million sterling. Aft ft Apothecaries were once in the habit of using a red light as a sign of their trade. It so happened one night that a druggist found - himself without the necessary red light, so as a substitute he placed a bottle of red liquid in the window with a candle behind it. He was so well pleased -with the effect that he placed another bottle of red liquid in another window. This sign mado such a brave showing that an envious rival cast about for means of improving tho 6ign. 'He hit upon the scheme of placing a bottle of yellow liquid by the side of the red one, and then surpassed his previous efforts and carried all before him by placing a green bottle by the side of the yellow one. The three made the sign which caught the approval of the town, and all the druggists quickly followed in the footsteps of their more original rivals. The bottles were later replaced by the handsome coloured vases which are now such a familiar sigh all over the world. 8 •*■■«.. Impetuous people are sometimes wrong, but impetuous people are not always wrong. This is a truism, but unless a truism be repeated occasionally it ceases to be identified, and is looked on by the casual reader, as a daring "flight of fancy. Beally it does not matter how quickly one runs, if one will but make sure that the right turning is selected. It is the man who rushes away without sparing a moment to look up at the signposts who loses his way, and has to return slowly, with an apologetic look upon his face; he it is who gives to impetuosity a bad name, and causes folk to look upon it as a defective trait. Most of the great things have been done by impetuous people while the overcautious have been making up what they term their minds. There are some who never can perform this task for themselves. They can take ho action without asking advice of every person they meet. The overcautious are in a never-ending state of astonish/nentat the fact that disaster so seldom, occurs;* When it does happen.-they are able to say, with gloomy content, that they had foreseen it all along. Impetuosity bas cut some of the most difficult knots the while . cautious folks were 'hurting their fingers ip ' futile attempts to unravel them.