RIDDLES.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 March 1933, Page 16 (Supplement)

RIDDLES.

(Sent by Bill Smith.) What has a heart in its head? A cabbage. What spins without something to make I? The world. SAD FATE OF EELS. THOUSANDS CUT OFF FROM SEA. Thousands of eels making their way from rivers to the sea have perished because the outlet of Lake Ellesmere, Canterbury, was blocked by shingle. The rivers flow into this lake, which is shut off from the sea by a narrow bar of shingle. Usually there is an outlet through the shingle for the water to' flow to the sea, but sometimes the action of the sea blocks up the outlet. The eel hatched far out at sea makes its way to inland waters in response to the call of Nature. When it is full grown its fate is to return to the sea again and then to perish. The eels found that the outlet from the coastal lake was blocked for the time being with shingle, and so, impelled by Nature they tried to wriggle their way overland, perishing on the shingle before they reached the sea. THE BEST BOOK. • STILL . THE BEST SELLER. ■ ■ - ■ ■ • f “We specialise in the impossible” seems fo be the motto of the Bible Society, .for., the last- yearly report, which is called The • Impossible, contains long chapters of difficulties overcome in a year of amazing achievement. As usual there are many stories of the courage of colporteurs, or Bible sellers, who carry the world’s best book to almost impenetrable places and thus prepare ffie way for the missionary. Those who say Christianity is dying In this country should read this report They will learn that over 633,000 Eng- ■ lish Bibles were sold last year, a larger - number then ever before, in spite of the financial crisis. Half a million copies alone were issued of the new popular shilling edition. Although there was a slight fell in income, many people sent their subscriptions as usual in spite of hard times. - From China comes surprising news, : for in this most troubled country four and a half million copies of Scripture, ; chiefly Gospels, were sold by 400 col- . portents. The sales of the society and ; other missions amounted to over eleven million copies. In other countries where conditions have ben serious the sales reached the highest point on record. When the society was formed in 1804 the great majority of the world’s inhabitants could neither read nor write, and parts of the Bible had been translated into only about 70 of the myriad forms of human speech. To-day part or the whole of the Scriptures may be read in over 900 languages. Bibles have been printed in over 150 tongues, a remarkable achievement of missionary scholars when it is remembered that in many languages there is such poverty of expression that it is almost impossible to find synonyms for the original. For instance, the Eskimo tongue spoken in Greenland and Labrador is only rv*h in words for the weather and hunting. 'Although there are a dozen ways of expressing the varying states of ice and snow many words used in the Bible convey nothing to the Eskimo. The ox had to be expressed by the words “almost a reindeer” and honey had to be called "the fat of that which resembles wasps,” for bees are also unknown. Yet a successful translation was made, and the Bible has become the Book of the Eskimo people, profoundly