Notes and Events.

Manawatu Herald, 8 July 1897, Page 2

Notes and Events.

I ♦ «• "Corks are thrown away in great quantities', and very few people think that there ig any value attached to . that material after it has served its purpose once as a stopper of a bottle/ saya Popular Science News "Never- . thless, it has become an important component of a city's refuge. -Great quantities of old cork are now used again in the manufacture of insulating covers of steampipes-and bofteri/'sf. ice-boxes and iee^houses, and olhtfrV apparatus to be protected from the. influence of the heat. Powdered cork is also used for filling in horsecollars; and the very latest application of this material is the filling-in of pneumatic tires with cork shavings. Mats 'for bath -rooms are made of cork, and it also enters into the composition of linoleum. Cheap life-., preservers are now also filled with bottle corks cut into peicea." Although nearly 80,000 persons visited the. Crystal Palace on- Easter Monday, not a' single charge arising out of the festivities came before th§ Penge magistrates. A palace of silver is to he the most imposing feature of the Omaha 'Trans-Mississippi Exposition. The . building is to be 400 ft. square, surmounted with mammoth ornamental towers, and the entire structnre will be covered with rolled silver. Over 300,000 square feet of external'sottace will be covered by the precious metal. In 1894 about 168,000,000 ooaoea of silver were produced, and cot quite 4,000,000 ounces of gold ; that is, 42 times as much silver as gold. Bice paper is not made from rice, but from the membranes of the bread-fruit tree. A patient in an English lunatic asylum who believes himself shut up in the old Fleet Prison for the National Debt has invented a simple automatio contrivance for the head of a lawn tennis racket to pick up the balls and abolish stooping. It acts perfectly well, and the asylum authorities have advised his friends to secure a patent for him in case be becomes cured. His other invention is a really efficacious preventive for seasickness.