NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1685, 13 March 1917, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Durham coalfields yield the largest quantity of British coal. Over £3(1,000 has been awarded to the navy in prize bounty since the war. According to an official return, dog licenses in 1915-10 yielded £713,942. The population of Russia is 174,000,000, including Finland and Asiatic Russia. A process Lor condensing milk was first invented by an American in 1849. One gallon of milk produces 11b. of cheese; 21 gallons yield 111), of butter. By 1890 the weekly half-holiday had been established in over a thousand towns in Great Britain. A Farnham bell-ringer, after cveling 72 mites, the same day rang a peal of 5,040 changes, lasting 3hr. 38min. The Emperor Francis Josef is said to have left £2,500,000 to wounded soldiers and to families of fallen soldiers. A party of Kalgoorlie miners have obtained a sensational yield of bullion, worth £4 per ounce, from 50 tons of ore. There are in London alone 1,800 charitable, organisations dispensing funds aggregating ten millions sterling per annum. Between thirty and fifty thousand telegrams pass through the hands of the censors in the United Kingdom every 24 hours. In England in 18G1 three hundred titled ladies pledged themselves to support only those firms which closed on Saturday afternoons. Experiments are being made in Ontario with cobalt with a view to its use as a substitute for nickel in the plating of metallic- objects. There is a great shipbuilding boom in America. More than 400 steel merchant vessels, of 1,428,000 tons, are being i.uilt in private yards. Germany's Zeppelin licet numbers probaly no more than forty airships. The rate of building hardly keeps pace with the rale of losses. A rope of 250 large pearls formerly worn by Queen Victoria, and bequeathed by her to Ihe Duchess of Albany, has been sold at Christie’s for £2,700. The plates from which Bank of England notes are prepared and engraved is a workshop to which no strangers are admitted. A century ago a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate charity funds. Us report dealt with 28,880 charities and filled 38 big folio volumes. It has been computed that tin* average individual in the civilised world uses eight matches a day. Three millions of them arc 1 struck every minute of the year. _ Major John Castle Gant, whose death, at the age of 100, was recently announced, joined the City of London Rifles at 43, and was Lugland’s oldest volunteer. A Devonshire villager made the first railway journey of his life of 40 years when he travelled to Exeter to undergo medical examination for'military service. Infantrymen play football in gashelmets as part of their military training. They thus become accustomed to wearing the helmets while engaged in strenuous action. The groat demand for horse flesh in Germany Ims so inflated the price that the Food Dictator has intervened and fixed the maximum price of horse flesh at Is 8d a pound.