NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1749, 6 November 1917, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Incubators are an Egyptian invention. There are 157,000 railwaynien in the army. Twelve average tea-plants produce 11b, of tea. Married couples in Norway may travel by rail for one fare and ahalf. The new Curtis biplane makes the enormous speed of 119 miles an hour. Chili has an extent of territory equal to one and a-half that of France. Salicylate of sodium is one of the best remedies to counteract blood poisoning. When an owl has young she brings, on an average, 40 mice a day to her nest. House infection in tuberculosis is practically negligible, and need not be feared. A man’s medical abilities are not to be measured by his adherence to obsolete customs. Frog-skin has been very successfully used in grafting on granulating wounds in the war. The largest watch in the United States weighs 115 pounds; the smallest .113 ounces Troy. A soap bubble is round because every part of its surface is equally pressed by the atmosphere. Sheep thrive best in a pasture infested with moles, because of the better drainage of the land. The tone of a bell or glass can be stopped by the finger, because the vibrations are thus checked. The apple grows wild in the Sandwich Islands. There arc forests of them, most of them neglected. Boiled water tastes flat and insipid because the gases it contained have been driven off by heat. The printing ink used on the Bank of England notes gets its deep-black tint from naptha smoke. The porcupine is so called because his name comes from the two Latin words meaning a thorny pig. Over one-half of the vapour in the atmosphere is within six thousand feet of. the surface of the earth. A tuning fork does not sound in a vacuum, because there is no air to convey the vibrations to our ears. An elephant’s sense of smell is so delicate that it can scent a human being at a distance of 1,000 yards. Sir Isaac Newton, on being asked his opinion of poetry, replied that it was a kind of ingenious nonsense. Red hair is of that colour because it is supposed to have a larger proportion of sulphur than black hair. A caterpillar is so greedy that in one month it usually devours six thousand times its own weight in food. More than 1,400 cities and towns in the United States now maintain evening schools for foreign-born adults. Included in the prizes at a whistdrive at Liraehouse, London, were two half-hundredweights of potatoes and 141 b. of sugar. In the British Museum are specimens of babies’ feeding-bottles dating back to between six and seven hundred years before Christ. Over 8,000,000 paper bags bearing appeals for thrift have been sold to traders by the British National War Savings Committee. The “S” (Simpson) rays, produced by the electric combustion of tungstate of iron and manganese, prove to have valuable curative properties. The leaf of the eoeoanut tree is nearly thirty feet long. A single leaf of the parasol magnolia of Ceylon affords shade for fifteen or twenty persons. Among the highest prices ever paid under the hammer for a book in England was £4,950 for the Fust and Schoeffer Psalter, printed on velum, 1459. The celebrated Mazarin Bible on vellum brought £4,000. Aconite or monkshood is a perennial weed. The root has been mistaken for horseradish, with fatal results. It should be destroyed wherever found by cutting below the surface as soon as a leaf shows above it. The colour of amber is of all shades, from pale straw to deep orange. A species called the Falerian, from its similarity in colour to the celebrated rich, golden wine of that name, was the most prized by the Romans. Wanted Known: You can get better groceries for the same money at Walker and Fume’s,