NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2231, 27 January 1921, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Ears which “wiggle” are said to indicate versatility of character. The estimated cost of the census to be taken in England this year is £500,000. Of the men in the Grenadier and Coldstream Guards, 98 per cent, are English. , ■ Premature baldness is blamed by a Paris doctor on some trouble with the teeth. Wet summers of moderate temperature are stated by many doctors to be the healthiest. A woman who recently died in Leeds has posed as a man successfully for over thirty years. Under the two British Coalition Governments, 121 Acts of Parliament have been carried. British colonels are in future to have free travelling warrants, and to retire at the age of seventy. This year there are 647,000 fewer cows and nearly 1,750,000 fewer sheep in Great Britain than in 1919. While a man’s heart is beating 70 times, a horsfe’s is pulsating but 40 times, and an elephant’s only 30. A herring boat at Scarborough has lately landed the biggest herring catch of the season —130,000 herrings. Elementary education has risen in England from £4 16s 4d per child in 1913-1914, to £lO 11s 4d in 1920'1921. Every year sees 130,000 little Londoners cradled, 75,000 persons laid to their rest, and 39,000 brides standing at the altar. Interrupted by the war, the sending of daily weather reports by wireless from the Eiffel Tower in Paris has just been resumed. A gardener at Lydney, in Gloucestershire, has been in the church i hoif’TiearJ.v seventy years, and lived in the same house all the time. A wonderful worked Hint, bearing images of birds and animals, and recently found in Berkshire, is estimated to be at least 50,000 years old.

A race near Paris between a motor car and a racehorse over a course of a kilometre resulted in the vietorv of the motor ear by 10 mot-

In 1917 an American socialist wqs sent to prison for six months for staling Iha l George Washington was addicted to drink and the use of strong language.

The badge adopted for British battleships and battle-cruisers is a circle, for light cruisers a pentagon, and a square set diamond wise for auxiliary craft.

The British Admiralty is expected to buy 2,000 square miles of smokeless coal in British Columbia,' Ihe biggest area known anywhere of this special coal. In the castle keep at Newcastle, England, 1,200 coins, 31 clay pipes, 14 wooden buckets, and a piece of Jacobean oak have been found at the bottom of a well.

A London shipowner who has just sent a cheque for £IO.OOO to King George’s Fund for Sailors lost his whole licet of nine ships through the .submarines during (be war,

Officers and other ranks in the British Army who were reported missing in all theatres of war, and 1 of whom no definite information has yet been received, numbered 99,868. Mau-o’-Wnr, hailed as the greatest living thoroughbred racehorse, recently travelled a mile and three furlongs in the record time of 2 minutes 14 and one-fifth seconds, in America. At the municipal elections at Polkstone .the candidates included a bus driver, a railway shunter, an engine-driver, a farmer, a gardener, a railway carman, and the town crier, Roumania has just sent to England her first consignment of eggs since the war. There were 1,000 cases, containing in all 1.414,000 eggs, and a similar quantity is to be sent each fortnight.

Japanese women drtss. their hair in the shape of a Imtlerliy when they arc ready to wed. Widows who desire to re-marry fasten their tresses at the back of the bead with tortoiseshell pins.

It is not generally known to what extent Canada produces gold and silver. la New Ontario alone £54,000,000 worth of gold ami silver have been extracted from the ground in the last 16 years.

The brilliant lights used in some cinema studios during the taking of film photographs give a -light of 500,000 candlepower, and recently several actors have had their sight seriously injured. Dresses made of banana or pineI apple fibre will appear soon on the ! European market, as a Frenchman Jms invented a machine for dealing | with the fibrous stems of such frees and reducing them to thread closely resembling flax. Nearly 25,000 people met with death nr injury on the English railways last-year, according to a report issued by the Ministry of Transport, The number killed was 932, while 23,983 .were injured. The persons killed included 361 suicides. The flamingo, the most gorgeous living bird, a mass of scarlet body, jet black under enormous wings, with long, slender neck, was becoming extremely rare in the New World, where its only resort is the islands of the Bahamas group; but a law has now been passed protecting it. The amount of energy.stored up in an atom is incredible. An atom of hydrogen gas weighs only a 300,000 millionth part of a grain, and j yet, according to Sir J. J. Thompj son, a cubic foot of this gas, weighJ ing a little over ?- oz., contains enj ough energy to produce the heat of ' 840 ton.: of burning coal.

A large quantity of alFkinds of stores, which cost tiie British War Office £200,000,000, will be dealt with gradually by the Disposals Board: Among the stores are: — •41,000 horse transport vehicles, 16,000 bicycles, 800,000 pairs of socks, 3,000,000 yards of tape, 500,000 packets needles. The United States, Great Britain, and Japan are now regulating the killing of seals in the North Pacific and the effect is that, in ten years, the seals have increased three times over. There were only 200,000 of them; there are now 600,000. Only one-fourth as many seals are being killed as were killed when scaling was not officially controlled.

There'are over 3,000,000 people in Sumatra and its adjoining islands, and they have been astonished to hear their Dutch governors announce that no more tigers are to be killed. . Tigers devour human beings in Sumatra as'elsewhere when they can, yet the natives arc told that they will be punished if they turn their hands against a tiger. The Dutch authorities will not kill the tigers because, they say, whatever their other offences, they kill and eat many wild boars, and wild boars are more destructive than tigers.