NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2111, 6 April 1920, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The bamboo sometimes grows two feet in 24 hours. A Sheffield firm uses up in ivory work 1,200 tusks a year. Potatoes seldom grow larger than marbles in Greenland. The oceans of the world measure about 324,000,000 cubic miles. Asparagus is said to be the oldest of all plants' used for food. A lion in a jungle will jump 25 or SO feet from a standing start. Java produces about-one-.seventh of the world's supply of cane sugar. There is about a mile of wire in the interior of an ordinary piano. Wild canaries were not yellow originally* but green or grey in colour. It requires about four pounds of fresh leaves to make one pound of dried tea.

Sweden is now using over 1,000,000 horse-power from- rivers and waterfalls.

Tunnels three miles long have been discovered excavated by South American ants. Twenty-four years is slated to be the average duration of life among the natives of India.

The River Amazon is estimated to be 700 feet deep at a point 1,000 miles from the sea.

The pearl is the only gem that does not require the lapidary’s art to bring out its beauty. Japan is protected from the sea by a system of dykes, more extensive even than those of Holland. The day of the Brahmins is divided bv their clocks into sixty hours

of twenty-four minutes each. In England, in the sixteenth cen-

tury, it was a common practice for the men to smoke in church. A Servian boy, 17 years old, recently walked 1,000 miles from Petrograd to Belgrade to see his mother.

Great Britain lias realised £llO,000,000 through the sale of surplus stores and property since the armistice.