BRIEF MENTION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7422, 7 June 1902, Page 3

BRIEF MENTION.

♦ Irish fisheries employ 27,000 men in 6000 boats. The Emperor William of Germany owns 260 farms. The world takes 236,0001 b of quinine in a single year. Cultivated land 1 produces 1600 times as much, acre for acre, as wild hunting .land. Dogs in Hamburg are taxed' according to size — the bigger the dog the ihigher the tax. ■ The sale of postage stamps in the United Kingdom amounts to 14£ millions of money yearly. Direct taxes in France amount to only £21 per £100, but in England they are £50 per £100. The paid-up capital of the various insurance companies of Great Britain is £19,341,910. Asia gets the largest interest on cost for her railways — £4 Is per cent, against £3 16s in Europe. In 1871 Germany had only eight cities with over 100,000 inhabitants. Now there are thirty-three. Cattle imported into France pay an average tax of 32s a head, sheep 4s a head, and wheat 50s a ton. A palm-tree which grows on the banks of the Amazon has leaves 30ft to 50ft in length and 10ft to 12ft in breadth. The River Dee, in Scotland, has had more poems written in its honour than am* other stream in the British Isles. The death rate of infants under thirteen months in England is 15 per cent, in Scotland 12 per cent, in Ireland 11 per cent. Tiie trade of the United Kingdom 'has multiplied twelve and' a half times since 1801, that of the colonies forty-six times. Germany makes £5,000,000 a year out of coal-tar dyes. She supplies seven-eighths of all the coal-tar dyes used in the world. English railway lines, the most expensive in the world, cost seven times as much to work as do the cheapest those of Sweden. When the wind blows a heavy gale, sixtyeight miles an hour, it exercises a pushing force of 161 b to every square foot of surface, z The average time occupied in the conveyance of the mails between London and Sydney, via the Suez Canal, is thirty-four days. ' The new Glasgow municipal telephone service has over 16,000 miles of underground wires, and provides for 20,000 subscribers. Hop-growing has co greatly increased in -the United States that last year 240,000 pickers were employed! to strip 72 "million hop-vines. . It is estimated that at the present rate of growth London, which now has a population of 5,657,000, will, in 1941, have over 13,000,000.. Nearly twenty-nine million acres of the forty-seven and' three-quarter million acres of farm-land in the United ' Kingdom is Government pasture. ' The majority of colour-blind people curiously enough, belong to the "educated classes," of whom no fewer than four per cent have this defect. ; Switzerland has, at Bex, salt mines which have been worked for 348 years. The galJeries are twenty-five miles in. length, and /the profit £15,000 a year. The French Automobile Club has printed a map on which are noted all electric stations in 'France at which the accumulators of the vehicles can be loaded. ; In connection with, the Van Dyck Tercentenary, which is to be celebrated at Antwerp this month, 1,000,000 special postage stamps bearing a portrait of the great Dutch painter will be issued. Great Britain and the United States are practically the only nations which have failed to adopt the metric system of weights and 1 measures. The population using them is over 445 millions. According to the official census returns, the poulationi of Canada is 5,369,666, showing an increase of 536,427 since the last census in 1891. The number of Canadians in the United States is 1,181,778. In the deepest known part of the Antarctic Ocean Sir James Ross in 1843 obtained a sounding of 4000 fathoms no bottom, and this sounding is more or less borne out by the results of the Valdivia expedition a few years ago, which took soundings frvftm Bouneb Island to Enderby Land, and obtained several soundings of over 3000 fathoms. l Canals in England have long been regarded as the most hopeless enterprise afoot. They were thought to have been killed by the • railways, and they have crept on in the old way, with their barges drawn by horses, in their narrow channels. It is probable that within eighteen months two leading English canals will pass into American hands and! will be run as the Erie system is run — by electric traction and with wide channels. A colony of about 250 Dutoh marketgardeners has builb up a large celery business at KaJamazoo, 'Michigan. A district that not long ago was a worthless swamp has been converted' toy this industry into land worth from £60 to £180 per acre. From twelve to fifteen million (heads of celery are sent away annually from the total area of 500 acres, most of which is divided into f aims of one acre or less. The Michigan celery is so highly appreciated that a large quantity of it is sent as far east as Philadelphia. A remarkable account has reached San Francisco (says the "Empire") of a race of white men living near the North Pole, and descended from Sir John Franklin's men. The disappearance of Franklin's expedition has always beea as much "a. mystery as a tragedy. In spite of fifteen relief expeditions and 1 the efforts of the civilised nations of the world, it was netfer knowni absolutely what became of the entire party. A record of Franklin's own death and of that of many of his officers and men was found, but the majority were not accounted for. Sir James Crichton Browne, the expert on brain, diseases, holds that "insomnia is not attended with, such disastrous consequences as is commonly •supposed-. It is not so dangerous as^ the solicitude of the sufferer. He suggests that the brains ot literary men, who are the most frequent victims, .acquire the trick of the heart, which takes a doze of a fraction of a second after each beat, and so manages to get six hours' rest in twenty-four. Some brains, in cases of insomnia, sleep in sections, different brain centres going off duty in turn. Large deposits of potassium salts, recently discovered in Germany, have caused; renewed discussion as to their origin, and! the- consensus of opinion is that the salts were originally precipitated from ocean water. Germany is rich in many kinds of salts, the depths of which are sometimes several hundred feet. One authority says a sea basin of 720 ft depth, would, evaporated^ precipitate but 12ft of salt. Hence it is plain that Nature so arranged bars for these basins that ocean water flowed in and was evaporated,, and the operation repeated, until the deposits reached) their maximum and the bar was made permanent. Some interesting experiments for the artificial production of rain by mean^ of electricity have been carried out in, Japan. The probability of greater success being obtained by this means, in lieu of tine system. of detonating explosives mi <tihe upper air strata, has often been advocated by scientists. This attempt by the Japanese, however, is the first practical effort to prove the truth of this theory, and it was attended with conspicuous success. The trials were made- in the Fukushima prefecture. Operations were commenced at eleven in the evening, but there were no signs of atmospheric change until nine o'clock next morning, when a cluster of clouds was observed over the hill on which the experiment was held. At length rain began: to fall, followed) by a second fall at 11 a.m., and afterwards a: third, fourth, and fifth — the last being about 9.30 in the eveninig. The area upon which the rain fell extended over many miles.