NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 2069, 18 December 1919, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Col mu bus look 37 days to cross the Atlantic. Hair grows much .raster in summer than in winter.. Flight was perfected by insects ‘25,(t00,000 or more years ago. .Nearly 4,000 islands are comprised in the Japanese dominions. Coffee was introduced into England in 10-11, and in 1052 was .C 5 Ids a pound. For hundreds of years the Nile Hoods have not varied ten days in their arrival. Twenty million bottles of pickles ore said to be consumed annually in America. No picture is hung in the Louvre, in Paris, until the artist has been dead ten years. Certain varieties of the lark are believed to lie the only birds that sing as they Hy. New York State forbids women in the core-rooms of .foundries to lift more than 25 pounds, The longest beard recorded was 12ft. The longest hair growing on a female head was 811. Of all the animals the tiger is the worst sea traveller, and the most susceptible to seasickness. Last year the British and Foreign Bible Society despatched 8,740,000,000 Bibles to all parts of the world accessible. Japanese breweries produce 210,000,000 gallons of sake, the national alcoholic beverage, from rice annually. In normal times about one in every fifteen Frenchmen is connected in some way with the wine and liquor -trade. Trees which grow on the southern side of a hill make more durable timber than those which grow on the northern side. British shipping passes through the Suez Canal to an extent greater than that of all other nations put together. It is an astonishing fact that an elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. The total number of muscles in u man is 527. \ The speech of Gypsies contains words from, the ancient Hindu and Sanskrit, older than any other surviving language. To increase production, some Connecticut cotton mills work their machinery 24 hours a day, employing three shifts of workers. The larges! butterfly known is a native of British New Guinea, measuring eleven indies across the wings. Specimens sell for £2O.

It would require 500,000 acres and a factory investment of £30,000,000 to produce one-twenty-fiftli of Britain’s sugar consumption.

Thirty-one' miles an hour is the top speed of the fastest ocean passenger liner afloat, the Mauretania, which holds the world’s record.

The Greeks used gold and silver as coins as early as the ninth century, and from that period to the present it has been common tender foi’ value.

A healthy man contains 51 ounces of phosphorus. This deadly poison would make 800,000 matches, or enough poison to kill five hundred persons.