INTERESTING FACTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 June 1930, Page 24 (Supplement)

INTERESTING FACTS.

. Windmills were in use in the East in ancient times, but were not much seen in Europe before' the thirteenth century. . Wind sawmills wore invented by a . Dutchman in the seventeenth century, and one was erected near the Strand, in London, in 1G53. Great improvements have been made in these mills in recent years, especially in the United States, where, by the application of the wind shaft principle, much space; is saved, and the mills can be used for pumping, grinding and other purposes. Oriel windows are windows projected from the front df a building, and may be rectangular, triagonal or pentagonal. The ordinary bay window and bow window are varieties of oriel. When an oriel window does not reach the ground it usually rests upon moulded sills supported by corbels. The alphabet is so called from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet—alpha, beta. It is the term applied to the collection of letters from which the words of a language are made up. The Phoenicians are credited with the first adoption of an alphabet. The Chinese have no alphabet, but signs which convoy ideas. The Sanskrit alphabet comprises 50 letters. x The fabled performance of the old woman of the nursery rhyme who “swept” the cobwebs, out of the sky has a scientific parallel in the ability of aviators under certain conditions to brush small clouds out of the skv by flying through them rapidly. The earring is a very ancient form of personal adornment, worn by both sexes in Oriental nations. In Anglo-. Saxon times earrings were worn in Britain, but from the tenth to fifteenth century they went out of fashion. In Elizabethan days they were revived. and have .since continued to be used to a greater or a lesser degree. Fakirs and Mohammedan mendicants, are held in great regard in India, There are two classes; those who are' strict devotees to the principles of Islam, and are .called dervishes, and those who are unattached to any religious order, but are simply wandering Mussulmen beggar.?—or itinerant socalled holy men. Some of the more fanatical fakirs’corinnit self-mutilation', and pride ’ them solves upon their ■ vv rc!cbedncfi.s.