NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2138, 10 June 1920, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

There are 30,000 Acts of Parliament on the British Statute Book, exclusive of the many Acts winch deal only with personal or local matters.

Jane Austen seems to have been the most poorly paid of all great novelists. During her life time she earned less than £7OO in all for the work of her pen.

Buenos Aires is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The census of 1914 shWed 1,575,000 inhabitants, and it is now estimated to be over 2,000,000.

German helmets, for which no use has been found, have been used as road-making material, and battened out by'a steam-roller in a Surrey artillery park. In 1850 America produced no inure than half a million pounds of candy, as against a present production estimated from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 pounds a year.

Forty residences and six theatres are included ill the list of the exKaiser’s property in Prussia, his fortune being formerly assessed at twenty millions sterling. The luggage lost on the railways of the United Kingdom every year would make a mountain if piled up. On one railway £BO,OOO was claimed by passengers last year for lost luggage.

Japan is preparing to build a pyramid for the first, emperor, Jimmu Tenno, somewhere in the suburbs of Tokio. It is the intention to make this the highest structure in the far East.

London is no longer the most populated city in the world. Greater New York, according to (he latest returns, now claims over 8,000,000 inhabitants, against the 7,400,000 of Greater London.

What is believed to be the greatest acreage -yield of corn ever reported in Pennsylvania was recently produced on a farm in East Donegal township, 5,500 bushels being raised on a plot of 27 acres. As an example of the extent to which silver and gold is being hoarded iii China, the incident is reported of an old woman paying for her purchase of a cotton mil! with £IOO,OOO worth of gold bars which she had dug out of its hiding place. The “Blackboy” is a grass tree which grows in Australia to a height of ten feel. It contains a gum which has recently been made to give tar, tarpaulin dressings, lacquers, steam-pipe lagging, paint, stains, carbolic acid, motor spirit, alcohol, coke, and potash—a veritable chemical store in a weed.

Covent Garden, London, a great fruit and vegetable market, which is proving too small for the needs of the population, was once a convent garden belonging to the abbots of Westminster, and wa.s used as pasture well into the eighteenth century. The beginnings of the mark'd were very primitive; just a few tumbledown sheds and shops. Some of these sold crockery,'and at other.-, snails, then employed to make broth for consumptive patients, were vended.

The Spanish cemeteries are among the most curious in the world. They consist of endless streets and squares (ianked by high walls and presenting a long array of niches, which are opened for the reception of coffins, and then plastered up. The niches are engraved with inscriptions, just like those on tombstones, and adorned with wreaths, dowers, children’s toys, bundles of ribbon, or framed portraits of the deceased. The walls are just wide enough to hold two coffins, on end, one put in from each side. Many distinguished persons have shared the fears which led Mrs Clara Maney, of Hove, to embody in her will a list of precautions against premature burial. Hans Anderson and Harriet Martineau left specific instructions that they should not be buried until everything had been done to make sure they were lifeless. So did Wilkie Cdllins, whose novel “Jezebel’s Daughter” contains a thrilling account of a scene in a German dead-house when an English widow, poisoned and supposed to be dead, sits up and confronts her enemies. Sir Richard Burton’s widow ordered that her body should be pierced with a needle in the region of the heart. Insects are notorious for their bad sight. A wasp will pounce upon a nail on a white-washed wall under the impression that the nailhead is a fly which will provide it with a meal; a white butterfly will flutter to a scrap of white, or even blue, paper, mistaking it for a fellow; a bee will alight upon any coloured piece of cloth and search diligently for nectar. A bluebottle or moth will bang its head repeatedly against ceiling or window pane, quite unable to “place” the obstruction or to percieve the difference between the white ceiling or windowpane and the blue sky. Poorly equipped, however, as it appears to be in vision, an insect’s sight is entirely adequate to meet the ordinary everyday needs of natural life.