BRIEF MENTION.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 12021, 21 March 1903, Page 3 (Supplement)

BRIEF MENTION.

London consumes 11 tons of salt a day. Sixty-five years ago Paris had only one post office. King Chuialonkorn of Siam Las forty-five other names. The Severn Tunnel lies 45fb to 100 ft below the bed of the river. The choir of York Minster is 120 ft from floor to roof, and is the highest in England. The making of wooden shoe-pegs yearly exhausts the product of 3500 acres of timber. "The Taliput palm of Ceylon has leaves winch are sometimes 20ft long and 18ft broad. J He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.—Powell. Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ainbi tions. —Longfellow. Tokio ought to be the cleanest town in the world. It has 800 public baths, used daily by 300,000 persons. Justice is the insurance we have on our lives nnd property, and obedience is the premium we pay for it.—Penn. The yearly bill for novels supplied to tile library of the French Chamber of Deputies is usually between £BOO and £9OO. High-class magic lanterns, to give a picture 9ft in diameter, cost from £l5O upwards. The lenses sometimes cost £4O apiece. A microscope which ordinarily magnifies 11.000 times has its power increased to 16,000 diameters by immersing its lens in vaseline oil. The number of copies of dailv newspapers circulated last year in the" United States was 2,865,466,000, and of weeklies 1,208,190,000. The Muir Glacier, in Alaska, is the largest- m the world. It is equal in size to all the Alpine ones put together, and covers 1500 square miles. Thirty-seven is the record number of people who ever went up together in a balloon. This was on Oct. 18, 1863 in •!%, Geimt >" belonging to M. Nadar. Two Roman coins, one a silver token of Domitian, A.D., 81-96. and the other a brass piece of Trajan, A.D., 98, have been unearthed in, Dowgate Hill, London, E.C. The committee of the French Automobile Club has decided to consider the advisableness of organising an international motorcar race from Paris to Madrid, in Mav 1903. J ' In 1856 a horse called Yellow Jack ran in six big English races, and was second in everyone of them. Ravensbury, belonging to Mr C. D. Rose, was second in five principal races in 1893. In the past thirty years there have been eleven instances of three weeks' absolute drought at Greenwich. In 1802 forty-nine I days without rain were recorded at Sunbury. This is the record for Britain. I Dr Sewell, who has been warden of New College for forty-three years, is about to resign that office. Dr Sewell, who will celebrate his ninety-second birthday next veek, has resided at New College for seventy-five years, having been successively scholar, fellow, tutor, and warden. He is the last survivor of the old school of Oxford heads of houses.

Major Craigie says that during the last seventy years the population of Europe has risen, in round numbers, from, 216,000,000 to 400,000,000; that of Asia and Africa has probably increased a little more slowly; that of America has beoome more than three and a half times as great as ifc was in 18S0. Altogether, the world's population is now about 1,600,000,000, and was 847,000,000.

Baron Hugo Orthel, a Muscdvite landowner, has for the last ten years never lefti his bed. He is in perfect' health, but has a theory that to live long one must avoid physical exercise. On the other hand, he considers it necessary to keep the brain active, arfd for this reason he personally superintends his immense receiving his stewards and tenants in bed. He is a great traveller, too, and is moved from one part of the world to another in a portable bed.

What does Paris think of Kitchener, who went, as he arrived, quietly in the night, with no one but a representative countryman or two to see him off, and no gallery save the railway employees? Well, it cannot. conceal a certain admiration for his manly, soldierly figure, which ihas plunged for a brief moment in Parisian life, and held on its way again towards •duty and work—more work. But Paris accounts him a strange General, because he is never represented sword in hand urging on the British forces, but always in the background as the organiser of victory.

When everybody is thoroughly scientific and uncomfortable, all homes will be single storied, without stairs, built on graveL soil, destitute of cellars, with concrete andr blocks of earthenware "pierced for ventilation" placed under the floor. The roof will be tiled, not slated, and the windows will reach from top to bottom of the walls. The chairs will be cushionless or. stuffed with medicated wool. The walls ought to be lined with wood that takes a high polish, and can be stained to any colour aha washed frequently. Curtains and draperies of all kinds will be abolished; for artistic touches we shall be depending on "plants of the indiarubber and eucalyptus type." Plants have developed almost as many dodges for perpetuating their existence as animals, only we don't so easily recognise them. Did it ever strike you that every seed, bulb or tuber is not merely a reservoir of material for the plant that is to grow out of it, but also a mass of fuel fop supplying heat necessary to the sprouting seedlet? More than this. If you look at the early spring buds and flowers, you will notice that those which are likely to be exposed to frost, such as catkins of willow and hazel, are well protected by a thick covering of soft material—a regular plantovercoat.

There has just bean placed in the New York Flower Hospital an expensive electrical apparatus, which is known as an actinolite, said to 'be the first complete instrument of the kind permanentiy set up in an American hospital. By its operation it is hoped to make a thorough test of the theory that the powerfully concentrated chemical, or actinic, Taiys of violet-coloured lighit possess distinctly curative properties in cases of cancer or tuberculosis. To the patient the operation is an entirely painless one, and its advocates claim for it that it has none of the objectionable features that often attend the application of the Roentgen rays to sensitive portions of the humaai body. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has just unearthed a curious case in Jersey City, U.S.A. There is a play going on in a theatre there called ■• The Lion's Bride," in which a lion, kept in a cage on the stage, roars loudly when the " bride," who is sentenced by a Turkish Sultan to death by mastication, comes into view. The regularity with which the fourfooted actor produced this roar always at the right time aroused the. suspicions of the Society's representative, who'discovered,: upon investigation, that electricity was used as the prompting agency. The Society has had the electrical wire that was fixed to the bottom of the cage disconnected, and the lion now roars at more or less irregular intervals.

Among the most interesting of thes*exhibits 5 *exhibits at the recent meeting of the Royal Society were the manuscripts of th© late Professor J. Couch Adams, relating to the discovery of Neptune. Adams determined in 1841, while still an under-graduate in his second year, to attack the problem, and in 1846 the planet was discovered. The earliest, though necessarily the least perfect of the papers, is, perhaps, the most interesting. In it the orbit and mass of the unknown planet that was disturbing Uranus arc calculated, and the final result set down in Adams' handwriting at the end of September, 1843, "three years before the planet was observed with the telescope," and two years before Leverrier had taken the matter in hand. Adams died in 1892.