BRIEF MENTION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8351, 24 June 1905, Page 3

BRIEF MENTION.

He only possesses time who profitably uses it. The greatness or a man is measured by the greatness of the service he renders. Sixty thousand elephants are annually slaughtered in Africa to secure ivory. To spot another man's faults and not detect your own is a kind of colour blindness. There are about 535,000 horses in Great Britain, and four and a half million cattle. The tobacco monopoly has yielded the Austrian Government the enormous net profit of £5,000,000 for -one year. The Russian Naval Budget for 1905 totals £12,135,415, of which £4,062,500 is to be devoted to new construction. False teeth of ivory, on plates of the ssm* material, and held in place by geld wires, were in use in the year 1000 B.C. The exact length of the Simplon tunnel is twelve miles x and a quarter. The contract price for the tunnel is over £2,350,000. The Ginnello Lock on the Seine is so constructed that one man can open or shut it by simply touching an electric button as he sits in his office. ...lie average daily population of the Irish workhouse for the past twelve months shows an increase of 1475 over the same period of the previous year. Lord Tennyson was the most wor- J shipped poet of the last generation. ! He made £4000 a year out of poetry, whereas no poet to-day makes 4000 pence. . Never before have Russian emigrants passed through Grimsby in such numbers as at the present time, every boat from Rotterdam bringing a complement of at least 50. The British Empire outside the United Kingdom only contains some 8,500,000 of people of British descent— that is to say, only one in forty of its total population. There is one lighthouse in the /world that is not placed on any mariners' chart. It is in the Arizona desert, and marks the spot where a well supplies pure, fresh water to travellers. The town of Valyevo, in Western Servia, has been visited by showers of black snow, brought by north winds from the vast coal districts. The streets appear as if covered with coot. The Uganda railway does not touch Uganda, but runs through the East Africa Protectorate, a vast territory that offers a home for thousands of white men.. Uganda, on the other hand, is not a, white man's country at all. On the authority of the greatest manufacturer of dental supplies in England there are over 40,0000z of pure gold worked up annually for dentists' use for material in filling teeth, in plates and solders, the value of this gold approximating £200,000. When sitting at rest, we inspire into the lungs about 480 cubic inches of air in a minute. If we take a sauntering walk, wo increase the quantity to about 840 cubic inches; but if we walk quickly, we increase it to considerably over 2000 cubic inches in ,a minute. ' A safe now being made for the Premier Diamond Mine Company is intended to hold £2,000,000 worth of diamonds. It will be the strongest safe ever constructed. Seven feet nigh, six feet wide, and weighing 21 tons, it will cost between £1500 and £2000. The steel door alone will weigh five tons. The cats-meat man is almost exclusively a London institution. Certain rounds have been sold for as much as £300 as going concerns, and many such rounds change hands at a price for the goodwill of from £20 to £100. Several London cats- meat men have made considerable fortunes. Copper has risen and aluminium has declined until the price of the two metals is almost the same. One pound of aluminium is equivalent to two of copper in carrying electrical energy, and if it were as easy to work and solder would probably displace copper in the electrical world. Paris is to have a novel place of entertainment in the form of a "duelodrom»," a building intended for the fighting of duels in public. The new edifice is to' be erected in the Champs de Mars, and the arena proper, in which the duels are to take place, will be surroun3ed by boxes for spectators. "Exercise," says Sir Lauder Brunton, M.D., "tends to expel bile from the liver, and prevent its accumulation in the biliary capillaries, but a little brisk exercise, as in riding, rowing, climbing, tennis, etc., will havein a few minutes a more beneficial action than a lazy constitutional walk of a couple of hours." . General Booth is very proud of his colonising farm at Hadleigh, and well may he be, for it is the biggest poultry farm in England, and houses over 2000 birds. Last year 18,340 eggs and 1185 birds were sold and 2286 chickens reared. Out of 104 "birds exhibited ninetythree took prizes, and close on £800 was j reported in sales. Two parishes in Berkshire have four ! inhabitants each ; in Buckingham there is a parish with but seven ; Oxford has one with eight; and several other counties have parishes with fewer than twenty; but, after all, the palm must be given to London, for the parish of j St Christopher-le-Stock is without a single inhabitant. , Those familiar with the monuments of Paris will be surprised to learn that for *-he first time since the reign of Louis Philippo the old abbey church of St Eustace, adjoining the Central Markets, has just been freed of the last vestiges of scaffolding. For nearly seventy years the magnificent building has been thus disfigured, much to the chagrin of lovers of mediaeval architecture. The London County Council is offering eighteen free scholarships to young women who have been in domestic service, to enable them to take a course of instruction in cookery. Candidates, who must be resident in London, and between seventeen and twenty-five years of age, will be required to pass an examination in elementary cookery. North Sea • fishermen are rejoicing over the successful raising of a huge archor of ancient pattern, whioh the mission' ship Cholmondeley has landed at ' Yarmouth. Hundreds of pounds worth of nets and gear have been destroyed by this anchor, which was covered with barnacles and live oysters, and is supposed to be a relic of the Spanish Armada. ' Btow largely the facilities to obtain cheap breakfasts are taken advantage of by children in London may be gathered from the fact that in the laet fourteen months the Salvation Army received nearly £130,000 in farthings from the tiny mites. For this smallest coin of the 1 realm they are able to obtain' a fairly substantial meal, whereas otherwise they would have gone breakfastless. The principal factories of the mouth organ, or mouth harmonica, as it is perhaps moro correctly termed, are at Trossingecn, in the Black Forest. Thesa instruments, it appears,, are . sold in greater quantities in the: United States than in any othsr country. At- Trossingen one firm alone has fifteen branch > factories, employs 2000 hands, and turfs out 6,000,000 mouth harmonicas ©very year- „ ' , . ; . v That an ordinary steel rail can be hurled high in the air and twisted twice around the trunk of a big tree seems incredible, yet there was photographic evidence the other day or such' an, occurrence at Nahaimoj B.C. Great havoc was wrought, and the big rail, which was lying on the ground 25ft from the spot at which the explosion occurred, was lifted in the air and wrapped around the trunk of a tree 12ft away, as if it had been mere wire. The explosive that did this is known as "gelignite." '