BRIEF MENTION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9790, 5 March 1910, Page 4

BRIEF MENTION.

Groat Britain's reformatory schools last year cost £139,058. The organ in the Royal Albert Hall, London, has over 109 utops. British yachts represent a total value of more than £8,500,000. An averago of over 500 London policemen arc on sick leave every day. The longest canal in the world connects Sfc Petersburg with China; it is 4472 miles long.

A delicato machine for making watch screws will cut a perfect thread on the finest human hair.

T.io percentage of applicants desiring to purchase small holdings is much greater in Wales than in England. Tho oyster is one of tho strongest of creature?', and the force required to open it is more than 1300 times its own weight. Within a minute a telegraphic messago of forty words can now be sont from London to Karachi—s374 miles—without retransmission.

Lake Superior is 335 miles in length; its greatest breadth is IGO miles; mean depth, 688 fee.t; elevation, 827 feet; and area, 82.000 square miles. Tho frog, owing to its peculiar structure, cannot breathe with the mouth open, and if it wore forcibly kept open, tho creature would die of suffocation. The Alpine Clubhouse on Mont Rosa, in the Alps, is probably at a greater altitude than any other'building in the world. Its foundation stones are exactly 12,000 ft above the- sea-level. The tallest trees in the.world are the gumtrees of Victoria, Australia. In some districts they average.3ooft high. The longest prostrated one measured 470 feet, and 81 feet in girth near tho roots.

New Zealand comprises 66.500,000 acres, of which about 17,000.000 acres are still covered with forest. It is estimated that there is enough timber to last the sawmillcrs about tiirty-five years.

Of all the textile territory in England, Manchester is the central market and clearing-house. In tho Manchester Exchange 177 towns are represented, eleven of them having each a population of 100.000 or over.

The Lord Provost of Glasgow, at the annual meeting of the Glasgow Savings Bank on December 22, said its deposits exceeded £1,000,000. its transactions represented £5,500,000, and the total funds were £11,000,000. A woman named Bradbury, aged eighty-four, who had been deaf, dumb and .mentally afflicted for some years, recently died, in the Stone (Staffordshire) Workhouse. She had been in the "house"- for seventy-two years. 'The great-aunt of Mr Nat Gould, the novelist, Mrs Catherine Gould, of Hanson Mount, Ashbourne, celebrated her 100 th birthday on December 21. She can recall the time, when maids came down early to work 7 and then, to their spinning wheels. One of the strangest streams in the world is in East. Africa. It flows in the direction of the sea. but never readies it. Just north of the Equator, and when only a few miles from the Indian Ocean, it flows into a desert, where it suddenly and completely disappears.

Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark and tho residence of the King. It was founded in the twelfth century, and has a population of over 450,000 people. Copenhagen ie now the centra of the whole of the trade of Denmark, and its staple products are butter, cattle, grain, leather and wool.

All indications point to the fact that less than ten 'Jiiles below our feet a red heat is maintained permanently, and within twenty a white heat. Ten milea above us wo have tho pitiless cold, far below zero, of interplanetary space. To what a narrow zone of delicately balanced temperature is life confined.

Whenever he goes travelling now, the Kaiser carries along an apparatus for disinfecting books and newspapers, for he is getting more afraid of miorobes. Of late the Kaiser will not touch even the most elaborately, bound new volume, or newspaper or magazine either, until it has gone through the disinfecting process. According to a musical authority, the mooing of a cow is set to a perfect fifth, octavo or tenth; the bark of a dog to a fourth or fifth; tho neighing of a horse is descent on the chromatic scale; while the donkey brays in a perfect ootave. Yet it is thought that the quality of the donkey's voice might be improved! A favourite Christmas pastime-in the fifteenth century was the "Fools' Dance." The performers, fantastically dressed, would caper wildly to the sound of the bagpipes and other miusical instruments. They would go dancing into the parish church, go round the building again and again, and thenoe pass into the graveyard. Tho King has granted the Medal for Distinguished Conduct in the Field to Colour-Sergeant W. King, Ist Battalion S. Nigerian Regiment, in recognition of his gallant conduct during the operations near Sonkwala, Southern Nigeria, in 1808. The operations are those in which an Anglo-German force fought together against the natives.

Having become experts at jiu-jitsu, Englishmen have now the opportunity of learning the latest athletic exercise imported from the Land of the Chrysanthemum—" ken-jitus," a kind of fencing, a display of which was recently given at Portsmouth by members of the local Physical Training School. The combatants use two-handed " swords,'' wear Japanese coetume, and aro, of course, well protected.

A farmer had 170 cows housed in different sheds; they were pestered with flies, but lie observed that in one shed the walls of which were a blue tint the cows were not worried. He therefore added a blue colour to the lime with which he washed the walls of his Vmildings. and from that time the flies have deserted his buildings. The following formula is used by him for the wash:—To 20 gallons of water add 101b of slaked lime and lib of ultramarine. The washing is done twice during the cummer.

The Lord Mayor of London, by virtue of his office, takes precedence of all the nobility not of Royal blood, and, though not generally known, it is nevertheless a fact that by virtue of that same o*Ece he is a Privy Ckmncillor, thougn in modern times never called on to act in that capacity. Pirobably the custom of attending the Privy Councils has fallen into abeyance through increasing pressure of work consequent upon the high office as it Btands to-day.

The Duke _of Connaught had an amusing experience when ho was invited to open a new riflo range in the south of England. He had, of course, been invited to fire the first shot, so ho made his way to the 500 yds range, and on arriving there raised the rifle to liis shoulder, and after a moment's pause pulled the trigger. The result, as was plain to everybody, was a bad miss, but the marker "signalled a "bull," and when the target wa6 fetched suro enough there was a hole right in the centre of the bull. The Duke said nothing at the time, but he made subsequent inquiries, and,'to his great amusement, found that this hole had been carefully made there the night before. Returns made to the United States Monetary Commission by 22,491 banks and financial institutions on April 28, 1909, place the total banking resources ot the country at £4,220,000,000. The total deposits are £2,821,000,000. Of the deposits, £1,393,200,0u) are subject to cheque withdrawal and £1,227.000,000 avo in savings banks and other interest-paying institutions. A supplementary inquiry,, undertaken on Juno 30, and including the compilations ot returns from 18,245 banks, shows that depositors in all bank? number 25,000,000, while thero are 15,000,000 accounts in interest-paying banks. The average interest paid by savings banks is 0.00 par cent, and tho average interest paid on other interest-drawing accounts is 3.1 per cent. The aver ■ per head bank resources for tho entire