PASSING REMARKS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 458, 20 April 1912, Page 3

PASSING REMARKS.

Madame Creel, the beautiful Mexican lady, is numbered as one of the wealthiest in the world. She derives an annual income of £1,000,000 chiefly from her mines. These mines, which were a present from her father, have already yielded over £400,00,000 worth of precious metal, but a big percentage has to be deducted from the sum for working expenses. However, she owns (500,000 head of cattle and 280,000 acres of very good land. Madame Creel's ha f s are her only extravagance.. For each of these she pays as much as £75. She attributes her economy in everything but headgear to the fact that when her father had 400,000 cattle on the plains of Chihuahua and a dozen silver mines he allowed her only five shillings a week for pocket-money. When the cutting of the Panama Canal was taken over by the United States it wag estimated by the engineers that 103,795,000 cubic yards would have to be excavated. That figure has already been passed, and there remains the task of removing about 71,000,000 cubic yards more. No fault is to be found with the arithmetic of the original estimate. The explanation is that, while the digging was in progress, it was found necessary to enlarge the dimensions of the canal prism, in order to provide for the accommodation of ships of a larger tonnage than those at first taken into account.

An eminent antiquarian, lecturing on "Clothes" recently showed that the band on the silk hat had originated from the habit of tying a band round a shawl placed over the head, whilst the bow at the side could be traced to remote ages, and was in the transi tory stage on Scotch bonnets and children's sailor hats. It was a noticeable fact that all ornaments on men's hats were on the left side, which was due to the fact that in olden times, | when it was frequently necessary to use the sword, it was obviously desirable that such decorations should not impede a cut with the weapon. "A large income is derived by the inhabitants of the coats of Japan from gathering and selling ordinary seaweed," said Mr Jeremiah King of Atlantic City, U.S.A. More than 3,000,000 yen is derived by the harvesters of the deep each year. This doesnot include the large amount of the product consumed by the natives. "Certain kinds of seaweed are used for food, and its by-products represent thousands of pounds annually. As choice a dessert as ever I have eaten was made from weeds gathered on the southern coast of Japan. This, mixed with sugar and sprinkled with rum, makes a dessert rarely equalled on this side of the Atlantic. There are families on the coast of Japan whose ancestors for hundreds uf years have lived entirely from the proceeds of the seaweed gathered from March to November and sold for food. Ths natives anchor branches of trees at the mouths of the rivers which flow into the ocean. The incoming tide deposits seaweed on the branches. The natives gather it, dry it, and after mincin? it with huge knives, sell it in large quantities." The first sleep i? the soundestafter the first hour the intensity of sleep slowly diminishes —hence the value of forty winks after dinner in quickly recuperating shattered powers. Temperature and vitality are lowest at about 2 a.m., so that two hours' sleep before midnight are worth four thereafter. Nature has no rule as to the lengths of sleep, except that men need less than women, since women are the more sensitive creatures, and a woman's heart beats five times more in a minute than u man's. Sleep should be just so long that when you j wake in the morning a stretch and a yawn only are necessary to land you j in a daytime of bounding vigour. As to early rising, it is comforting to hear Dr Bryce say it is a habit that has gone far to wreck th n constitution of many a growing youth. A man can train himself until he becomes a splendid runner of the Marathon type, but he is not necessarily a good football player, because the set of muscles needed for the one kind of work has to be developed along lines peculiar to it. Many reasons have been given for the lack of good male singing voices, but the real reason lies in the fact that men will not take the time to study. There are men whose voices could be developed into wonderful singing voices, but many of them have not taken the time to discover this, and those who know they possess them will not take the time to study. Some of them have referred to the art as "fit for women and foreigners." If a man has time to study, he generally seeks the professional side of life, and the result is a spendid batch of lawyers, physicians and others of various scientific callings. The other class, with time to spare, go in for club life or pursuits of a reckless nature that will tend to bring in to their lives that excitement so essential to the present day living. Men with remarkable voices have been known, after four months of study, to want to be permitted to sing some of the opera 3. They wonder why they cannot, little thinking that they would call the man crazy who, after four months of the study of grammar, would try to write a literary masterpiece. Professor Charles Richet, of Paris, has devised a method of filtering the air of rooms, removing from it all the dust and microbes that may fly in through the windows. He has made a veritable microbe trap, which consists

of a spray of liquid falling upon an electric ventillating fan. The fan moves in a large cylinder, open above and below, and admitting about 7000 cubic feet per hour. Above the ventilator is placed a reservoir containing about three quarts of liquid, the flow of which is regulated to about a quart an hour. The liquid—glycerine, soap, and water or plain water—falls in drops upon the vanes of the fan and is by their rapid movement sprayed upon the inner sides of the cylinder. This spray gathers to itself all the dust and microbes which enter through the window behind the ventilator; it trickles down the sides of the cylinder and is received in a receptacle at the bottom of this. The apparatus which Professor Richet exhibited to the Academy of Medicine in Paris captured in three hours 100,000 microbes. It is designed especially for use in schools, theatres, and other places where large crowds assemble indoors.