ITEMS OF INTEREST.

Waikato Times, Volume 95, Issue 14873, 11 February 1922, Page 9 (Supplement)

ITEMS OF INTEREST.

FROM THE WORLD’S PRESS. An average pig yields 1121 b of pork.' Turbot lay 14,000,000 eggs in a season, and cod 9,000,000. After the age of 50, the brain loses an ounce every ten years. “Taffy,” the nickname for Welshmen, is simply a diminutive for David. England has had a tax on beer for 800 years past. There are on an average 2000 sleepers to a mile of railway. The Bog of Allen, the biggest in Ireland, is in places 17ft deep. Eight men die suddenly to one woman.

The world’s coalfields cover at least 1,250,000 square miles..

Mails were first sent by rail in 1830, between Liverpool and Manchester. It is said that there is never an odd number of rows on an ear of com.

A fisherman in Kent caught a pike and found inside it a sparrow, which it had just swallowed. Twenty-three acres of ground are needed every year to bury London’s dead.

A centenarian of Aldershot is recorded as having lost his first tooth at the age of 102. Great Britain contains 60 specimens of mammalia, 374 of birds, 14 of reptiles, and 264 of fish.

A train of goods oars over a milo long was recently hauled by one locomotive in Western Canada. An eel has two separate hearts. One beats, at sixty, the other at 160, times a minute.

Sixty girls named Jones are applying for admission to Swansea Training College (Wales) this year. Westminster has a new road machine, costing £2OOO, which will save, the council iiuuu a year in wages. A general election which has .just taken place in Norway has entirely upheld the Prohibition law. Bees never store honey in the light, because honey so exposed granulates, and it is thus useless to the bees.

Bread made of clay, grass and moss, as eaten by the vicitms of the Russian famine, was recently exhibited at Riga. Judging the distance of stars from the earth almost at a glance is a useful power owned by a woman astronomer. Forty-two babes in forty-four years, the record of a woman who died near Rugby (Eng.) in 1726, is said to be still unbeaten.

Wine is poured first into the host’s glass so that he may taste it and assure himself of its quality before offering it to his guests. If a sailor had not killed it with his cutlass, a shark would have upset a boat Load of shipwrecked men in the Pacific a short time ago. Books, however damaged, can now be repaired, and missing pages replaced, by special treatment, which is, however, very costly. ft is estimated that an English boy, between the age of 10 and 19, spends 16,500 hours in study, and 4UUO in bodily exercise. The biggest wine-cooler is at Windsor (Eng.), and belongs to the Jxing. It was made for George IV., and two men could sit in it with ease.

In London the wind is south-west for an average of 11 i days in the year. It blows from the north for 16 days only, and from the south for 18. When a Jewish master-tailor employs a new hand, the latter leaves his scissors as a guarantee that he will start work on the appointed day. That girls should not allow men to pay fares, etc., for them is the belief of a well-known English clergyman, who welcomes feminine independence. An attempt to compel a transport company to carry drink through Prohibition territory in Canada has failed 1 in the Supreme Court at Ottawa. Miss Hilda Johnstone, of Manchester, has neen appointed Professor of History at London University. She will be at Royal Holloway College..

A thief has paid a great compliment to the preacher at Salem Congregational Church, in Massachusetts: he has stolen a bundle of sermons. The available water-power of Europe, the United States, and the British Empire is reckoned at 140 million horse-power, with 18 millions developed.

Over 700 cabbages sent to London from Lincolnshire, and. sold for 15, left the grower with 0d profit. Carriage and commission' swallowed up the rest.

Physical exercises prescribed for men over fifty years of age by Sir James Cantilia are the same as were used by the Chinese over 5000 year* ago.

The two eggs • laid by a pigeon almost invariably produce male and female; and it has been shown by experiments that the first egg laid is female and the second male. A boy who walked 800 miles from Geneva, in Indiana, to see his father, said: “I always slept with my feet towards the cast, and kept track of the turns I made during the day."

In New York State there are 3000 State-supported schools with not more than ten pupils. Fifteen have one pupil, fifty-two have two, and one hundred and sixty-seven have only three.

By a typist’s error £IOOO too much was paid to a Glasgow hotel-keeper as compensation. Tile hotelkeeper is now in Australia, but efforts are being made to put the matter right. An excited crowd at Naples, having pursued an old woman into her cave hovel, where they believed her to be preparing an evil potion, found her making—camomile tea. The old church of Stoke Poges. in the shadow of which Gray wrote his immortal Elegy, has been exactly reproduced in the cemetery in Memorial Park, at Glendale, California.

An ingenious American has discovered that a million people live in the heart of New York in streets that would not hold half of them if something happened to .empty every building.

Queen Wilhelmina, of the Netherlands, is an expert linguist. She is a good horsewoman, draws cleverly, is a fairly accomplished musician, and has an intimate acquaintance with all of the details of practical housework.

Of the 25 candidates passing an examination for staff posts in tile International Labour Ofllee of the League of Nations, the winners were ten British, nine French, two Swiss, and one each from Belgium, Jugo-Slavia, Canada, and New Zealand.