NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2105, 20 March 1920, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Last year China exported 10,000,00011). of raw silk, Japan nearly 32,t»(HMK)(Hh. f Italy (i.OOO.DODIh., mid Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria 2.81)0,(M)()lh. hclwccu them. France produced 533,00011). Wigs originated in France by Louis XII. in the seventeenth century. They wore used more as ornaments, and (he French king started the fashion to conceyl his promature baldness. Last year Great Britain used 2,fi80 million gallons of petrol, as against 1,200 million gallons in 1914, and it is expected that the consumption next year will exceed 3,000 million gallons. Slang is by no means of modern date, being well-known in Ihe classic ages of Greece and Rome. Numerous examples occur in the writing of Martial, Aristophanes, Terence, and others. , Dark-haired people, so says an authority, get married sootier than fair-haired individuals. He had shown by statistics that an overwhelming majority of those women who live and die spinsters have fair hair. One of the mo,-1, remarkable plants is a South American orchid which* takes a drink whenever it feels thirsty by lotting down a tube into the water. The tube is coiled up on the top of the plant when not required for use. Tim climbing catfish of Colombia can climb by moans of suction apparatus, not only up the steeply-in-clined bed of a mountain torrent, hut even up a smooth vertical surface.