CASH CURIOSITIES.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 12027, 28 March 1903, Page 2 (Supplement)

CASH CURIOSITIES.

(Pearson's Weekly.! One of the most costly scourges of our. times is smoke, so fair as those who live in towns are concerned. The amount of solid into the atmospher& is enormous. During every day in the winter time London alone discharges aboub seven million tons of smoke-laden air into, the atmosphere. This means that London loses a sixth of its daily sunshine in summer, and actually a half in winter. The cost by pollution of the air is incalculable. The cost of the extra artificial illuminai tion is difficult to estimate, but £60,000 does not seem an extravagant amount. A bad fog in London means that £SOOO a day must be paid for gas alone. A remedy has been suggested which j would increase the rates by perhaps lOd in | the pound. The smoke refuse, sooty particles and what not, would be removed before the air escaped into the outside atmosphere. A large number of independent flues would be led into a single smoke stack. The contaminated air would be led away by means of large fans, similar to those used to ventilate our coal mines. Some colliery fans deliver 200,000 cubic feet of air every minute. It would require only 500 such fans to carry away the whole, of the household smoke of London. A very costly scourge must that be reckoned which costs the working classes £11,000,000 .a year by loss in wages ; this is consumption. No fewer than 42,000 persons die of consumption every year. One.eleventlh of the pauperism of the country results from. this disease, and it entail poor-law '■ rates amounting to a million pounds each year. Impure air has much to do with this. Man-eating tdgeors are costly things to deal with. For instance, a man-eating tiger, and tigress are committing depredations on man and beast in the Bhandara. district of India. Much credit would attach to •their' slaughter, and rewards of £2O apiece are being held out for their carcases. Despite all this, the ferocious creatures are still on tlue warpath. Chasing criminals is an expensive sport. The Bank of England spent nearly £50,000 before it succeeded in capturing those archforgers, Bidwell and his two confederates, after a chase which led the captors almost/ round the globe. The estimate of £SO a day is regarded! as giving a fair idea of what it costs to run down a man connected with a big fraud, in this country. Every Mediterranean coast city knows about the disappearanee of the criminal within a day of the discovery being made. All large cities throughout the United' States are advised of the crime and criminal. Those cities along the Atlantic seaboard, from Boston to Jacksonville, receive explicit details regarding the person wanted. AH this means a large monetary expenditure. Very costly is a war between commercial firms. Take the case of disbursements for newspaper advertisements. On a recent occasion one British firm spent between £6OOO and £7OOO in a single day on such advertisements. This was distributed over some one hundred newspapers. The firm's rivals made an attempt to block this advertisement scheme. Large spaces in the newspapers were booked up. The result was that many newspapers were compelled, for sheer lack of space, to decline the advertising firm's remunerative orders.

A very valuable football was that possessed by a boy in one of the poorest parts of Liverpool. It was a parchment roll. A gentleman who was passing •noticed the; football, and on examination discovered ib was an old MS. in Latin.*

The boy's parents could not give any account as to, how it came into their possession ; they had preserved it on account of the coloured pictures it contained. That football, carefully cleaned, is in the possession of the President of Uchaw College, near Durham. It is an illuminated letter of King Henry "VTII. A costly thing is municipal government—it is not widely known how costly. Between 1874 and 1889 we decreased our national debt by £137,000,000. In that, time the municipal debt was increased by £183,000,000, and now totals up to the appalling sum of £300,000,000. Worse still, this is totally out of proportion in many instances to that of the ratable value which constitutes the chief item in the available assets of the country. To take the case of eight representative towns, Sir Alexander Henderson, M.P., has shown that Huddersfield lias borrowed £563 nigainst each £IOO of its ratable value, Manchester £534, Bradford £438, Nottingham £390, Birmingham £386, Leeds £367, Sheffield £305 and Liverpool £230. In fact, thore is a vast increase in loorf debt

for tie wholo country, it having trebled in the last twenty-five years, while the raltabla value has increased less than 30 per cent. In considering all these expensive tilings there is one consolation, there is a sum of £6,000,000 for each of us—in the sea. A Yorkshire professor of geology has figured; out fchei amount of gold in the and has recorded it in tons. He has also taken the trouble to work it out in sovereign*. Ignoring odd sums, he has found out that the amount for each man, woman and child on Dhe face of the earth comes to six millions. This will be interesting, reaoing to the would-be millionaire, no doubt.