GRAINS OF KNOWLEDGE.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 June 1926, Page 23

GRAINS OF KNOWLEDGE.

Whalebone is used in Greenland for making boats and sledges. The badge of the chimney-sweep in Bavaria is a high silk hat. Of every thousand marriages in London, fifteen are between cousins. Although it has a huge tongue, the whale has very little sense of taste. In one month a eatenpiller devours 6,000 times its own weight in food. Nelson’s monument in London weighs 1.500 tons and is 177 feet high. In Iceland men kiss whom they meet, but a man rarely kisses a woman. Soot falls on London at the rate of 369 tons per square mile annually. A square mile will accommodate 7,965,000 people standing close together. The fee for a registered letter was originally 2s 6d and afterwards Is. Flowering plants known In the British Isles exceed 250.000 varieties. Twenty thousand words jn the English language are of French origin. The working power of an able-bodied man is about one-tenth that of a horse. Cleopatra’s Needle, on the Thames Embankment, London, weights ISO tons. Mahogany trees do not reach their full height until they are 200 years old. The value of the property in museums in Britain is estimated at £80.000,000. Twenty more inches of rain fall every year in the west of England than in the east. Nine of ten people can hear better with the right ear than they can with the left.