NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1755, 4 September 1917, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Wild birds do not sing more than eight or ten weeks in a year. Teachers are trained at the schools in Canada at the public expense. Compasses on night-flying aeroplanes are now illuminated by radium preparations, A seaplane is carrying the mails between Italy and Sardinia, 140 miles, in 100 minutes. At a farmer’s Red Cross sale at Uckfield three hen’s eggs laid on (he scale fetched 535. A Texas man has invented a lattice frame around a stove, on which clothes are fastened to dry. Betting on Canadian racecourses has been prohibited from August Ist until six months after the war. In a tempest, the pace of a, wave has been reckoned by one statistician at about 44 yards per second. The total amount of a-beslo,---bcaring rock mined in Quebec daring last year amounted to 2,291,087 tons. It is stated that the tremendous noise of the eruption of Cotopaxi, 1714, was heard over six hundred miles. The host examples of the English literary ballad are Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner’’ and Tennyson’s “Revenge.” To economise leather and other material, Munich has ordered its indoor employees to wear sandals without socks. An inventor has given an envelope an additional (lap to be fastened over the address, so that if can be used a second time. Two privates in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers cannot speak a word of English, and (heir platoon commander knows no Welsh. In 1914 the British Army Veterinary Service consisted of 431 offi - cers and men; at the present time it has a strength of over 25,000. A chicken has been hatched in Andover with two heads, one beak, two bodies, four legs, and four wings. It lived only a short lime. During (he war, Norway has lost merchant ships of an aggregate tonnage of 740,000, which is about onethird of her entire merchant fleet. The aim of the authorities of the British Museum is to have a copy of every hook published.- There are in that vast library 7,125,000 books. An engenions instrument called the “Telefunken compass” utilises wireless telegraphy to give aeroplanes and ships at sea their exact position. The great vine at Hampton Court is bearing about 250 hunches of grapes in splendid condition, the average weight of matured bunches being 2111). A menu-card on which Captain Evans, of 11.M.5. Broke, drew a few penguins has been sold tor £I,OOO, which is to be given to the Red Cross Society. Russia is twenty times larger than France and Germany put together, and her population numbers 105,000,000; 100,000,000 more than that of Germany. A cah proprietor of Chailey, Sussex, having had to join the army, Mrs Jellicoo, a cousin of Admiral Jcllicoe, has undertaken to act as cabdriver in bis place. Champagne owes its quality to the soil, a mixture of salt, silica, light clay and oxide of iron, and to the great care and delicate manipulation in manufacture.