SEW. ODD, INTERESTING.

Matamata Record, Volume II, Issue 66, 24 January 1918, Page 1

SEW. ODD, INTERESTING.

The inhabitants of South America eat sorpents, lizards, and centipedes. The Bank of England suspended cash payments twice—once in 1696, and secondly in 1797. The use of sights on cannon for aiming did not commend it-self until the beginning of the nineteenth century. A man respires, that is, draws in breath, sixteen to twenty times a min- | ute, or twenty thousand times a day. There have been twenty-seven cases of insanity in the Bavarian lloyal family during the last hundred years. Pine-applo juice is stated by a wellknown doctor to be a most powerful digestive. The oldest manuscript written on cotton paper in England is in the British Museum, and it hears date 1049. Needles were first made in 1545, when the making of ten was a good day’s work. Some of the largest ocean steamers can be converted into armed cruisers in thirty hours. A penny is estimated to change hands about 125,000 times in the course of its life. Two hundred penny-in-the-slut machines which supply newspapers, are now installed in Berlin. Pineapples arc so plentiful in Natal at certain seasons that thev are not worth carting to market, and so are often given to pigs. The common slang word “mash” is from a beautiful gipsy word,, “mafada,” which means “to charm by the eyes.’l Sir James Chrichton-Browne once emphasised the curative value of light. Sunlight, he remarked, will cure more of our ailments than any other single agent. It is now stated that the world will be over-peopled at the end of 175 years. This brings us to the year 2,081, when the population at the present rate of increase, will be 5,994 million people. A curious well in Canada produces sand instead of water. The sand comes up in a fine stream like a fountain. The force which drives it to the surface from a depth of 100 ft. has not yet been discovered. It is estimated that the average amount of power lost in overcoming friction in machinery and mill work is 50 per cent, of the gross power, the loss occurring at the lubricated surface.

The British Museum has books written on bricks, tiles, oystershells, bones, and flat stones, together with manuscripts on bark, on leaves, on ivory, leather, parchment, papyrus, lead, iron, copper, and wood.

In the forty years between 1792 and 1832 there were outstanding notes of the Bank of England, presumed to have been lost or destroyed, amounting to £1,330,000 odd, e.vcry shilling of which was clear profit to the Bank.

As illustrating the excellence of the paper (which is made from unused linen scraps) upon which Bank of England notes are printed, it is stated that when one of these notes is twisted into a rope it will sustain a weight of 358 pounds.

One of the few millionaires possessed by Spain is working as an ordinary workman in a soap manufactory at Berlin. He owns the largest soap Factory in Madrid, but wishes personally to learn the difference between 'he German and French modes •< king soap.