NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 124, 10 September 1875, Page 11

NEWS IN BRIEF.

*+ A simple way to make a new pen hold ink is to put it for a second or two in a lighted candle, and then plunge it in the ink while hot. So far from spoiling it, it rather improves. A current item of art gossip states G-nstave Dore is to receive ,£IO,OOO for illustrating a splendid pictorial edition of Shakespesra to be published shortly. An Italian photographer, named Josellis, has invented a method by which he can take photographs of objects ut the bottom of the sea from a diving bell. A society at Florence has lent him. a steamer with which to prosecute his researches. A popular writer, who had assumed the norn de plume of "Timothy Trim," was buried in Paris recently. For years he wrote the leading article in the 'Petit Journal,' which was daily read by 2,000,000 people. From this non-political paper, price one sou,- he received 72,000f . a year, and yet poor " Timothy '* died in the Maison Dubois, where indigent men of letters often end then: career. " Timothy Trim's " real name was Leo Lespes, and he began life as secretary to the well-known Detective Vidocq. The word •' Brigand" comes from the Irish Brigh, a mountain. A Brig Und is, or was originally, a mountaineer. The last survivor of the famous tea party that destroyed the British tea in Boston harbor on the lObh December, 1773, was David Kinnisen, who died in Chicago in 1851, at the extraordinaryage of 115.

Sugar was first made known to Europeans by the conquests of Alexander the (Treat. Nearchus, one of hia admirals, descended the Indus, and afterwards describing sugar, said that it was a sort of honey growing in canes or reeds. Statistical tables show, that there are in the whole world about 164 cities with 100,000 inhabitants ; 9 with over 1,000,000 ; 12 with from 1,000,000 down to 500.000 ; 20 with from 300,000 to 400,000 ; 33 with from 200,000 to 300,000 ; and 90 with from 100,000 to 200,000. The aggregate of the population of these large cities comprise 50,000,000 inhabitants — that is to say, the twenty-eigtht part of the entire population'of .the globe.