ITEMS OF INTEREST.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17384, 21 April 1928, Page 13 (Supplement)

ITEMS OF INTEREST.

FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS.

An open-air swimming bath is t» be provided at London Fields, Hackney, at a cost of £IO,OOO.

Fir trees sometimes reach a height of 120 feet, but an oak of this stature is rare. . ,

English telephone subscribers caa now ring up twelve countries ia Europe.

Silk is considered unclean by th« Mohammedans because it is the product of a worm.

The Suez Canal is 103 miles ia length. Its average depth is 36 feet, and its greatest width 350 feet.

The Portuguese Government has decided to burn 30 million postage stamps belonging to old issues.

A system of lighting which gives 300 different colour effects is a feature of a cinema in Dagenham (Eng.).

The world's largest spider is found in Sumatra. Its body is 9in in cir-i cumference, and its legs spread 17in.

£SOOO has been raised for the Royal Lancaster Infirmary by 3700 workpeople of the town, under a weekly contribution scheme.

The manuscript of Goldsmith's translation into English verse of Vida's "Game of Chess" realised £5600 at Messrs Sotheby's.

Caleb Fawcett, an 11-year-014 Guildford Grammar School boy, has been appointed organist of St, Martha's Church, near Guildford.

Cheques for a total of over 41,000 million pounds were dealt with by the London Bankers' Clearing House last year.

Six thousand five hundred and seventy-seven miles of pipes are needed to distribute London's water supply.

Scorpions are known to have starved for 36'8 days, and spiders have existed for seventeen months without food.

• Mars rotates on its axis in 24 hours 37 minutes 22 seconds, so that its day is only slightly longer than that of the earth.

People in English prisons during 1926 averaged 10,860 daily; this was 351 ahead of the figure of the previous year.

Domestic fires are claimed to be responsible for depositing 3,000,000 tons of solid matter on the soil of Britain every year.

Aluminium is more abundant throughout the world than any other metal. It forms over 8 per cent, of the earth's crust.

Women's desire for slimness has resulted in a very great decrease ia the manufacture of chocolate and other confectionery.

A man dumping snow fell into a manhole of the Quebec sewers, and was rescued a mile away as he was swept into the St. Charles River.

The Astronomer Royal of England calculates that the daily movement of the tides is lengthening by a thousandth part of a second every century.

The death's head moth, common ia the United Kingdom till about thirty years ago, but now very rare, emits squeaks almost as loud as those of a mouse.

A Greek emigrant to America has left £IOOO to erect a monument ia Sparta to Leonidas, who defended Thermopylae against the Persians 24 centuries ago.

An eight year old Holstein cow at a farm near Peterborough, Ontario, has established a record by producing 19,6691 b of milk and 8191 b of butter, fat in 305 days.

In Russia there is a "language island," where about a million and a half German-speaking people form a community founded in the first case by Catherine the Great.'

Fashions, both male and female, affect industry. Short skirts for women increased unemployment, while turn-ed-up trousers for men benefited, the fancy sock trade.

The lexis from the Koran which have long swung from the minarets of mosques in Turkey have in many cases been replaced by an invitation to "Buy Turkish Products."

Funnels were filled to motor ships because when the first of these, the Sclandia, was put into service in 1912 manv emigrants refused to sail in her because she lacked funnels^

Among some Indian tribes of North America it is customary to cut the hair of widows and forbid them to remarry until their hair has growi again to its original length.

Ninepcnce a pound is being offered to Swedish fishermen for herringscales. The scales of the small herrings found in the Baltic are being used for making artificial pearls.

A shark's egg is unprovided with shell, but the contents are protected bv a' thick, leathery covering almost as clastic as indiarubber. The average size is 2in by 2 Jin, and the colour almost pure black.

Constable Truelove, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, recently returned to Cochrane, Ontario, after a thousand-mile trip on snow-shoes, bringing with him an Indian prisoner from a trading post in .the far north.

A ne.wly-tapped hot spring at Niederbreisig, on the bank of the Rhine between Bonn and Coblenz, maintains an uninterrupted gush of hot water richly impregnated with carbonic acid gas. It is the biggest geyser of its kind in Europe.

What is claimed to be the deepest electric furnace in the world has just been put into operation in a South African mine. This furnace, which is being worked at a depth of 6'500 feet, has been installed for the heating of carbon drill steel.

A discovery likely to prove of the greatest importance in wireless and X-ray work, and, indeed, in electrical euginering generally, has just becu made in the production of a new kind of metal which will allow an electric current to pass through it in only ons direction.