NEWS IN BRIEF.

Kumara Times, Issue 2585, 4 October 1884, Page 3

NEWS IN BRIEF.

[From the Auckland Herald.] Nelson has started a telephone exchange with 30 subscribers. The tower of St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Auckland is now up 130 feet. A Fire Brigade Demonstration will be held in Christchurch at an early date. A Roman villa has been discovered at Woolstone, on the Earl of Craven’s estate. The first article ever extensively advertised was “Rowland’s Macassar Oil.” Then “ Day and Martin’s Blacking.” Fivepence a word is now the highest rate paid for telegraphing from one point to another in the United States. An English ship-building firm has received an order from the German Governraent for the largest torpedo-boat ever built, Napoleon’s empty tomb at St. Helena, overhung by weeping willows, is still guarded by a French sergeant and two soldiers. All telegraph, telephone, and electric wires in New York and Brooklyn must be put under ground after November Ist, 1885. Last year in this colony 292 persons (253 males and 39 females) met with accidental deaths; 146 of this number were drowned. In Tangiers they punish theives by cutting off the band they have least need of; and such a thing as kleptomania is unknown. Hydrophobia attacked a man in Coffee County, Ala., after smoking a pipe belonging to a man who had been bitten by a mad dog. The English climate is regarded as inferior to that of France, yet the average of life in England exceeds that of Prance by eleven years. Hereafter the bodies of yellow fever victims in Havana are to be burned. It is stated that long after burial the disease germs remain active. The shaft of Gen. Sutter’s old mill at Caloma, Cal., where gold was first discovered by Marshall, in 1848, has just been placed in a museum in San Francisco. A New York photographer says iu 19 out of 20 cases the left side of a face gives the most characteristic likeness though the right side is the more symmetrical. Miss Ada Campbell, described by a Melbourne paper as “ an infidel leeturess,” is at present in South Australia. Her lectures are severely condemned. Returns already in show that the total reduction made in the rents of the Irish peasantry by the Land Commission will amount this year to nearly £3,000,000. General Grant calculates that by the close of the present century the population of the American Republic will bo about 100,000,000, and that New Y T ork will be the financial centre of the world. The sale of cigars in London and the prominent cities of England has diminished considerably within the past five months, and the smokers have taken to pipes. They fear explosives in the cigars. Boys and girls are not allowed to be out after dark in Walla Walla, Washington Territory. No tobacconist can sell anything to children under 14 years of age, and no liquor is sold on Sunday, The Cliine.se in Victoria have greatly diminished in numbers. In 1859 they numbered 42,000 in Victoria; now there are only 44,000 distributed all over the colonies, and in Victoria the number is only 12,000. An extraordinary suicide lately took place in the beautiful Stadt Park, at Vienna. A man, who is unknown, saturated himself with petroleum, which be set on fire He was soon ablaze from bead to foot, but was removed to the hospital, where he soon afterwards died.