NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1683, 8 March 1917, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Five is the great sacred Chinese number.

A lifeboat costs £7O per annum to maintain.

Finger-nails grow at the rate of rather more than 11 inches a year.

The chances of life in England are 40 per cent, greater than in India.

Small nostrils are said by physiologists to indicate small and weak lungs.

Paper is now being used for bandages in the German field and town hospitals. Forty-four muscles are called into play in the production of the human voice.

Canada's oldest monastexy —that of the austere Trappises at Oka — has been burned down.

The Greek labourers round about Salonika have christened the British soldier “Johnny.”

The red grouse is found nowhere outside the British Isles, except where it has been exported. The Peninsula medal, granted in 1847 to survivors of the war, had, in some cases, ‘2B clasps.

Camels’ milk is said to be not only very palatable, but also extremely strengthening and nourishing. The late Sir Hiram Maxim, the “chronic inventor,’ - ’ as he once called himself, left estate value £33,000.

It is estimated that there are between 200,000,000 and 300,000,000 acres covered by timber in Canada.

A flowering plant is said to abstract from the soil two hundred times its own weight in water during its life.

The Pacific Ocean covers 78,000,000 square miles, the Atlantic 25,000,000, and the Mediterranean Sea 1,000,000.

It is said by scientific men that the hair from the tail of the horse is the strongest single animal thread known.

Cases of small-pox, typhoid fever, blood poisoning, and consumption are not at all uneoimnon among pawnbrokers' assistants.

A ealeh of pilchards in Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, England, is estimated at over ()00 hogsheads, and is worth about £21,000. The right hand is more sensitive to the touch than the left, but is less sensitive than the hitter to the effect of heat and cold.

A total of 178,537 men enlisted in Canada last year for overseas service. Since the war began 385,955 have joined the colours. In Russia with the exception of Finland and Poland, the calender of the old style is used, which is 13 davs behind the new stvle.

The Russian State sceptre is of solid gold, 3ft. long, and contains, among its ornaments, 2(iß diamonds, 300 rubies,, and 15 emeralds.

The most remarkable canal in the world is the one between AVorley and St. Helens, in Lancashire. It is sixteen miles long and underground from end to end.

Broad-headed horses are the cleverest. In the British Household Cavalry the horses with broad foreheads learn their drill more rapidly than the others.

Evening classes have been established at Llandudno to leach boys cookery. 'Die classes, which are under the direction of a local chef, are receiving the support of the local hotel-keepers.

The lantcrn-tly of Surinam, South America, has two sets of eyes, so as to catch the light from all directions. Its light is like that of the ordinary firefly, but it is much more brilliant.

The cost of hiring the film of the Battle, of the Somme for the lirst week was but £4O, and each week the cost is proportionately less. At one Loudon house over £I,OOO was taken at the doors.

Mr Valentine Davis, a prominent vegetarian, declares that if we cultivate the soil of England as we did half a century ago it would feed 24,000,000 people, and find employment for 750,000 men.

India-rubber trees that are lapped every other day continue to yield sap for more than twenty years, and it is a curious fact that the oldest and most frequently tapped trees produce the richest sap.

Maidstone Corporation, England, has been experimenting in municipal fanning, and a potato patch of a little under four acres at the Sewage Disposal Works has shown the encouraging prolit of £1(10,

Scientific research, says an exchange, has solved a problem in relation to the production of a successful British magneto which should take out of German hands a monopoly which has been held too long. In the American total, church music accounts for £10,000,000 a year. The sale of pianos reaches £27,000,000, of organs £2,000,000, of gramophones and records £13,000,000, and of sheet music and musical books £2,100,000.

An apparently deserted pantechnicon, stranded in a field, is used by the Germans as a carrier-pigeon camp, the birds being used in the front trenches at night when the Allies’ drum-lire has destroyed the telephone wires. Nearly forty million feet of leather is required for the boots of our soldiers and those of our allies whom we are supplying, and ail the

best hides on the market have been commandeered by the British Government to meet this gigantic demand.

Canada, after the war, proposes to establish a State-owned line of fast Atlantic passenger and cargo steamers operating in summer between Great Britain and St. Lawrence ports and in winter with Halifax as the Dominion ocean terminal.

Thimbles were formerly made only of iron and brass, but in comparatively late years they have been made of gold, silver, steel, horn, ivory, and even glass and pearl. In China beautiful carved pearl thimbles are seen bound with gold and with the end of gold.