All Sorts

New Zealand Tablet, 14 October 1909, Page 1638

All Sorts

The London Stock Exchange has 5400. members. Conscripts in France have to serve for two years.. *~ Nearly all of the world's supply of asbestos conies from 'Canada. . ' * ' Mr. W. P. Frith painted his famous picture, 'Derby Day,' after only one visit to the race. It is estimated that in Egypt there are 10,000,000 people who can neither read nor write. In London alone there are some 2000 societies and institutions for the relief of misery ■ and suffering. Germany has built a motor-car, armed with a quickfiring gun, specially adapted for use against airships.The largest flower in the world is found in Sumatra. Its size is fully 3ft in diameter — about the size of a carriage wheel. • " " Russia has a larger proportion of blind people than any other. European country. Two out of every 1000 of her people are sightless. Office Boy : ' Here's a lady what insists on seem' you. awful excited!' Edibor: 'Then escort her to the composing-room!' ••»- Every rule has an exception. For instance,- we are told that the road to success is to begin at the bottom and work up, but this would scarcely, be successful if we started to dig a well. ' I have written a book that everybody ought to read/ said the author. ' I'm afraid it .won't do,' answered the , publisher. ' What the public "seems to want now is a book that nobody ought to read.' ' What do you think of the tariff revision ?' \ ' It strikes me that the tariff is a good deal like the weather. No matter what kind you get, it's pretty sure to be bad for somebody's business.' Magistrate : ' You say he admitted stealing the wheelbarrow. Now, I want to know what were the exact words he made use of. Did he say, " I stole the wheelbarrow?" ' Witness : ' Oh, no, sir. Your name was never mentioned.' " ' - 'My grandfather,' said the new neighbor, who was making a duty-call, ' was a great portrait-painter. With one stroke he could change a smiling face into a sad one.' 'Huh!' exclaimed small Johnny, who happened, to be in the parlor, ' our teacher can do that.' It was at a theatre in Dublin. The king, aged and infirm, was blessed with two sons. He was pacing up and down the stage, with a wearied, troubled look, exclaiming aloud : 'On which of these sons shall 1 bestow the crown ?' The house was nearly brought down with laughter when a little man in the gallery stood up and shouted : -' Treat 'em fair, guv'norj can't ye give 'em half-a-crown' apiece?' A certain member of the British Government, who was admittedly a great failure, was being discussed by two of his colleagues. ' And now,' concluded one, ' they want to make him a peer !' ' No,' said the other, with great acumen, ' they want to make him disappear.'' Dooley's summing up of the playhouse reform controversy is interesting : ' Sthrange to say, both sides admit that th' theaytre is an idjacationl institution. I never thought iv it that way. I always supposed that people wint to th' theaytre because they had no comfortable homes to go to, or to f'rgit th' dishes weren't washed, or to laugh or c^-y or have a good spell iv coughing where it wud atthract attention. But it seems I was wrong. Th' theaytre is intinded to be more like a night school thin a circus. It's a good thing f ',r th' theaytres that th' people, that go to thim don't know this. If they - felt they were bein' idjacated whin they thought they were" neglectin' their minds they'd mob th'" box office to get their money back. Army recollection they have iv idjacation is clouded with sorrow.' The largest plants that' grow in the world — exceeding in size, even the giant sequoias of California — are found in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, at the extremities of the • western hemisphere, and belong to the order of brown seaweeds. Off the Alaskan coast and .among the Aleutian Islands, is the sea otter's cabbage. /On the surface, of the water floats a barrel-shaped air vessel, six or seven -feet long, from which grows a mass of foliage consisting of forty or fifty great fronds, each one of, which may be from thirty to fifty feet in length. Upon the air vessel the sea otter lurks while it pursues its vocation of fishing for a living. The whole floating mass is anchored in -place by a slender, cord-like stalk that is attached to the rocks far below. This anchor line often exceeds three hundred feet in length, and is so strong and _ slender that sections of it are cured and' used by- the Aleutian Islanders for fishing lines. At the other extremity of the . hemisphere is a, related plant said by botanists sometimes to exceed 1500 feet in length, being in this "respect the greatest thing in the world. Instead of one large air vessel, this has many small ones, supporting a floating mass of vegetation hundreds - of square yards in area.