NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1700, 19 April 1917, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Operative steelworkers, earning £l3 to £ls weekly, were fined £3 each for absenteeism in Monmouthshire Munitions Court. During the last six weeks in England there have been 2,000 prosecutions for lighting offences in the metropolitan police area alone. Lava retains its heat longer than any other known substance. It has been known to remain at boiling point a foot below its surface for 53 years. A girl recently drove a pair of horses attached to the local steam fire-engine from Emsworth to a fire at Horndeau, a distance of about seven miles. A Berlin firm who recently advertised the sale of a consignment of geese received 30,000 applications for 3,000 birds, which realised I'rom 35s to £3 each. Clothes will be rendered lireproof if a solution of phosphate of ammonia (about four ounces to every quart of water) be added to the water they are washed in. The first cannon ever cast in England appears to have been made in 1543, by Ralph Hogge. The house in which he lived is still in existence in Buxted, Sussex. Baby dolls and new silver coins which had been mixed with the Christmas and New Year’s puddings are being very carefully preserved by the British troops in France. Two youths who were fined at Bow Street were said to be the ringleaders of a gang who frequented a cinema and blew small shot through programmes rolled up as pea-shoot-ers. The most powerful telescope now in use magnifies 2,000 diameters. As the moon is 240,000 miles from the earth it is thus, to all intents and purposes, brought within 120 miles of our world. The municipal councils of all watering-places in (he Basses-Py-renees have adopted the principle of a daily tax of one penny to be imposed on all holiday-makers who stay in their respective towns. Statistics issued by the Austrian Government show (hat 15,200 church bells have been melted down for war purposes in Austria and Hungary. The aggregate weight of metal was 7,4(34 tons. There exists at Unionville, Ontario, a pioneer house 124 years old. This is probably a unique record for a Canadian log-house, and it is said to be the oldest log-house of similar dimensions in the Dominion. A romance of trade was revealed at Shoreditch Tribunal recently, when a man stated that 33 years ago he started business in a little back room at 7s a week, and by a life’s hard work, he now had a turnover of £25,000. It is now just 30 years since the daring experiment of a queue was tried —at the home of experiments, the Court Theatre, in Sloane Square. Pinero's “Dandy Dick” was the play, and Mrs John Wood was one of the reasons for the crowd. Messrs Curtis and Harvey? the powder manufacturers, state that a Mark VII. bullet leaves the muzzle of a rifle with a velocity of 2,440 ft. per second. Fired upwards, it attains an altitude of nearly two miles, but returns to earth with a velocity of only 220 ft. per second. A statistician has discovered that at the London Palladium last year there were 1,453 performers, which were attended by 3,000,000 people. Of the audience 01 per cent, were women, 8 per cent, children, and 31 per cent, men, 40 per cent, of the latter being in uniform. .Though wolves are almost extinct in France, there is still maintained a staff of 100 “lieutenants de la louveterie,” whose nominal duty it is to keep these animals under. The officers draw no pay, but the State provides them with a showy uniform adorned with wolf-head buttons. Possibly the youngest pensioner from the British Army is a boy at present engaged at a Portsmouth brewery works. Although not yet sixteen years of age, he has served a year as a band boy in the Dorset Regiment, and was discharged with a ruptured lung and a pension of 5s a week.

The demand for jewellery by wealthy Americans is keeping the price of these valuables very high. At a sale of jewels at Christies’, the amount reached was £35,000. An octagonal emerald with three drop brilliants, forming a brooch, realised £1,100; another, of a square emerald and eight oval drop brilliants, £940; and a bracelet of three oblong emeralds and four brilliants £930.

Shellitis, says Dr. Rangard, is a deafness which is the frequent result of the physical and mental disturbances consequent on the explosion of a large calibre shell in the vicinity of the patient, though no fragment has actually struck him. This deafness is of two distinct varieties. In the first place there are actual organic lesions in the ear due to a sudden excess of pressure on the drum. In the second the troubles are functional and have their origin in simple disturbances of the nervous system.

At the Sixth Congress of Exhibitors of Cinema Films, recently held at Chicago, it was stated that at the present time there are no fewer than 21,000 halls and theatres at which this class of entertainment is given in the United States. These entertainments are attended by no fewer than 25,000,000 persons daily, or say more than onequarter of the entire population of (he States. They employ upwards of 250,000 operators, whose weekly wages amount to 2,300,000 dollars. ’The total amount invested in these undertakings was stated to exceed 2,000,000,000 dollars 000 sterling.