NEWS IN BRIEF

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2394, 18 February 1922, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF

■ There are 12 British field-mar-shals. Siam has a contingent of girl guides. There are 12,000 railway workers in India. One lighted gas-jet consumes as much air as four adults. The average waggon load on British railways is 5.34 tons. Women now possesses full suf-

frage rights in twenty-one countries. Shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea average one for every day in the year. Dutch children are dressed in exactly the same styles as their parents. Banknotes are said to have been used in China nearly 5,000 years ago. Bread is the daily food of less than one-third of the world’s population. A woi-king horse was sold for half-a-crown at a farm sale in Aberdeenshire. Through coughing violently, an American business man broke his breastbone. The cost of living in England fell 7 points between October Ist and November Ist. Oxygen breathed in by any person can be measured by a newlydesigned apparatus. An aeroplane of a new type is claimed to be able to travel at 184 miles an hour. ' In 150 years Clerkenwell has been a rural district, suburb, and slum of London. Hospitals are still retained by the British Ministry of Pensions to the number of 100. In England last year £450,000,000 was spent on drink, and £100,000,000 on tobacco. Dolls and many other toys were 100 per cent, cheaper in England this Christmas than last. \ Women pass through mental changes at the-ages of twenty-eight, thirty-five, and forty-five. Paris charwomen have formed a union, and adopted a -wages scale and new conditions of work.

Acton, London’s latest borough, made a profit of £IOO last year on dances held in the local baths. The" most treacherous animals to deal with in captivity are said to be jaguars and black panthers. Bullet-proof corsets are to be supplied to New York police detectives assigned to dangerous duties. Houses actually finished under the British Government housing schemes number over 80,000.

Bankruptcies in Great Britain numbered 518 in 1919, 1,032 in 1920, and 2,453 for the first nine months of 1921.

Fish-tails, cleansed, deodourised, and dried, are a novel trimming for ladies’ hats now being tried by milliners. -—». . The lowest price of coal in England in February last was 58s a ton; for the same quantity 47s is now charged. Aviation prizes totalling more than £40,000 have been awarded by (he London Daily Mail since its inception. Children in average attendance m public elementary schools in Great Britain during 1020 numbered 5,187,000. It is a wise man who keeps a good thing to himself. It is an extraordinarily clever one who keeps a naughty one to hiihselL

Marriage statistics go to prove that men of any age lend in the mass to Choose wives of an age corresponding to their own. Several kinds of dyes are obtained from trees. In some parts the brown juice of “butter-nut” bark is used for staining cloth. Rats are found in every part of the world except the l’olar regions. In a. bog near Fribourg, Switzerland, the horns, five and a-half feet wide, of a prehistoric giant slag, have been found. Britain’s war taxes —Army, Navy and Air Force—are this year over £2O for every head of a family in the kingdom-