News Items

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4383, 9 March 1909, Page 1

News Items

Oil the average, four out of every six men use tobacco. Only 71 people in Great Britain have salaries of over <£sooo a year. The average cost of maintenance of the Royal yachts is £23,000 a year, The Emperor of Japan retains the services of 30 physicians and 60 priests.

A silken thread is three times as strong as a flaxen one of the same thickness.

It is calculated that a heavy fall of snow costs London ratepayers £15,000 a day. Sugar exists not only in the cane, beetroot, and maple, but in'the sap of 187 other plants. Only one man in 203 is over 6ft. iu height. Nearly 20,000 women are ' employed in Prussia as brickmakers.

Berlin has a divorce club with members all of whom are divorced.

' Every year American tourists spend from £10,000,000 to £20,000,000 in foreign countries.

The new dry dock of the South-Western Railway Company, to be built at Southhamp.ton, will be 100 ft iu length, the longest in the world. New German street signs not only have the names of the streets which cross, but also indicate the distances to the nearest important streets.

Niue British sovereigns have begun and ended their reigns on the same day of the week. Of these Henry I. and Bichard 111 both succeeded and died on Sunday. '

Several bullets, which must have been fired by the Parliamentary troops during the Civil War, have been found embedded iu the rocks adjoining Dartmouth Castle.

There are small farms in England and France for the rearing of butterflies for collectors, for the adornment of women’s hats, and for experimentation in silkmaking. An automobile, equipped with a wireless telegraphy apparatus, was recently shown, at a Brussels exhibition. -■ i k an equipment has een found satisfactory in army operations The various proposals which aic uo w before the municipality for beautifying, I'niis represent a grand aggregate expenditure of £32,000,000. A large proportion of the improvements is already in progress. A young servant named Au.y Keeton, who was employed at Brock 1 ~ England, recently iued suicide bv drinking a bottle of whiskv af«- r receivletter from a breaking off their engagenn 11. A Boston horfi< \ "ist has succeeded in pn>,l a pew and remarkable fru Ijy cross- 1 iug cucumber and orange plants. The new fruit, which is yellow in colour and devoid of seed, is said to possess a most agreeable flavour. With the modern sky scraping office building has come a 1 new form of building scaffold. Inslead cf constructing the scaffold from below, which is impossible in the cases of build ings ranging from 10 to 50 storiV, platforms are suspended from steel girders above.