BRIEF MENTION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6126, 12 March 1898, Page 4

BRIEF MENTION.

1 ♦■ Only one person in a thousand dies of old ' age. Land in the City of London is worth wer ,£2.000,000 an acre. in the Amerioan merchant navytlwre are 13000 British sailors employed. Great Britain controls twenty-ono-outof every hundred square miles of the earth's surface. Upon an average there are 10,000 pineapples, imported into London every week throughout the year. On December 29 Mr Gladstone celebrated his 88th birthday. Many congratulatory messages. reached him at Cannes. There are over 30,000 persons engaged iv the-Civil Service of the United Kingdom, with an aggregate salary of £4,000,000. By a curious coincidence the number of lives lost at sea during 1896 in British merchant ships is returned as exactly 1897. A cubic foot of newly -fallen snow weighs five and a half pounds, and has twelve times the bulk of an equal weight of water. The office of groom-in-waiting to the Queen just rendered vacant, is worth -3334 a year. The duties occupy about six weeks in the year. Mr Henry Russell, composer of "Cheer, Boys, Cheer," and 800 other patriotio-songs, has just completed his 85th year, and is till bale and hearty. Sweden is about to undertake the measurement of a degree of latitude within the Arctic Circle. An expedition will be sent out in May to make a preliminary survey. Marriages and births in London, according to the County Council returns, are on the decline. The death-rate is also _iminishing. Last year there were 39,869 marriages in London. What is pobably tho most venerable piece of furniture in existence is now in the British Museum. It is the throne of Queen Hatsu, who reigned in the Nile Valley some 1600 years before Christ. Lady Millais, widow of the painter, has died in Scotland in the house in which she was born nearly seventy years ago. She . succumbed to the same malady which brought about the death of her hus- . band. Four railway companies— the GreatL^._ Western, the Great Eastern, the SouthA Western, and the North - Western— •/ bring into London about 20,000,000 gal-/ lons of milk every year — so, at least, it km\ estimated. '■„., It is not too muoh to say, asserts a statistician, that in Great Britain a million of money might be saved annually' on funeral and marriage ceremonies, witii no disrespect to dead and an inorease oC comfort to the living. The oldest London theatres are Sadler's Wells, started aB an orchestral assembly room in 1683 ; Her Majesty's, opened in 1705 ; Haymarket, 1720 j Covent Garden, 1732 ; Astley. 1773 j Surrey (as a circus), 1782 ; and Lyceum, 1795. A female centenarian, wbo has just died in the Scottish village in which she was born, and whare she had resided all her life, leaves 269 descendants. Her husband, who was a fisherman, perished from exposure in a storm fifty years ago. In Russia, when coffins are covered with cloth, the colour of the covering is, to a certain extent, distinctive, pink being used when the deceased is a child or a young person, crimson for women, and'brown for widows; but black is in no case employed. When the Queen ascended the throne there were thirteen crimes punishable with death in this country. Since the statute of 1861 there remain now only four, namely : setting fire to her Majesty's dockyards or arsenals, piracy with violence, treason, and murder. If we could have all the armies of the Continent on a war footing and drawn up in one long procession, with their guns and ammunition and baggage waggons, the column would be rather more than 24,000 miles long, and, marching day and night, it would take nearly a year to pass a given point. Queen Victoria is said to possess some very old watches. Among them are two little gold ones, by Breguet, supposed to be 100 years old. One is a repeater, the other a blind man's watch. Both of these are in constant use and keep good time. They are about the size of a two-shilling piece, and have silver dials. Your ticket printed while you wait is the latest adaptation of the penny-in-the-slofc machine. Germany is the place which has taken the lead in tbe matter, and at many of the Gorman railway stations passengers, who are going to the suburbs, instead of having to wait in a longtime at the tioketoffice to the imminent (danger of losing, theiv train, Biniply go tdjfche maohine, drop, in the necessary coin,, and get out a ticket. The popular impression that every family possesses a Bible as well as a dictionary and a copy of Shakespere, like other popular impressions, seems to be an erroneous one, for there is in New York a firm that makes a business of renting out Bibles of an expensive and handsome kind, I suitable to hand to a bishop or a fashionable clergyman on the occasion of a christening, wedding, or funeral in the family. - There is an example of an English Prince becoming a clorgyman. Cardinal Yorke, the eminent Roman Catholic prelate, who died in 1809, was the son of the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, and hence the grandson of our James 11. He was the last Prince, direct and legitimate, of the Stuart family, but gave up his political life and ambitions to work for the Catholic Church as a priest, and finally became a cardinal. The parcels which pa.sed through tho English post last Christmas in point of numbers eclipsed all previous records. Their total is roughly estimated at 1,600,000. To overtake the Christmas postal traffic 6000 additional hands were employed. There is no indication that the Christmas card is losing favour. In one or two newspapers, however, advertisements appeared, wishing friends the "compliments of the Season," winding up with "No cards." There are over 200 women in Amerioa who have been regularly ordained as ministers, besides nearly three times as many evangelists and lay preachers The Church of the Disoiples has no fewer than forfcy-six of its regular ministers » women, the Universalist Church forty, J the Free Will Baptists thirty-eight, the j Unitarians twenty-four, the Congrega- I tionals twenty-three, the United Brethren 7* of Christ twenty-one, and the Protestant ' Methodist Church eight. Greater London is double the size of' Greater New York. It has double the population, twioe as many policemen, four times as many scholars ingpublic schools, more public libraries, and only half the number of hospitals. On the other hand, ther« is in New York a ohurch or a chapel for every 3000 persons, while London pro-; vides one f or every 4000; there aie nine more cemeteries ; and one family out of every 200 is relieved by organised charity, compared to one in about forty-five maintained by London ratepayers. A complete electrical kitchen has been arranged at the Duane Street station of the Edison Electrio Illuminating Company of New York, which is presided over by a skilled chef, who serves electrically -cooked luncheons to the heads of departments and officials of the company. In this latest of modern kitchens the electric ovens are brought to theiidesired heat in af very short timo, and a uniform degree of temperature is easily maintained, so that the cooking process requires less time than by tha ordinary heat direot from ooal or gas. Bargmann, the greatJßavarian small arm manufacturer, has recently produced a pooket pistol whioh is capable of firing six bullets in two seconds. It is no toy weapon, For a thirty-two calibre steel bullet discharged by it can cut through a six-inch hard wood plank at threo hundred yards, rhe peculiarity of the weapon js that before pulling tho trigger the marksman oan deBide how many of the shots ,up to bjx he wishes to use, while tho recoil of eaoh shot is made use of by the revolver itself in dissharging the bullets, the weapon itself beingpsmokeiess.