NEWS IN BRIEF

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2418, 18 April 1922, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF

The human brain contains 300,000,000 nerve cells. Port wine contains from 17 to 25 per cent, of alcohol. A good reader will take in 12 or 13 words at one glance. For 25 years no bread has been baked in Norway on Sunday. The “flints” used in pocket lighters are an alloy of iron and cerium. The cost of living in Vienna is now about 00,000 times that of 1014. It is estimated that a single pound of silk is the product of 2,300 silkworms. Tn a pack of playing cards there are 035,013,559,600 different whist hands. Tunbridge Wells was a fashionable resort of the Court in the time of Charles 11. The first factory for making stoneware in England was established in Fulham in 1611. Radishes, of which the native country is unknown, were introduced to Britain in 1548. Edible frogs and snails are being brought to London from France by .air every day. It is harder to frown than to smile. To smile you use only 13 muscles, but to frown you use 64.

Pensions are being paid to 3,500,000 men, women and idiililren by the British Ministry of Pensions.

About 50,000 people listen every night to wireless concerts within a radius of 1,500 mile:-, fit' New York. The name “London" is a combination of two Celtic words, “Lyn,” meaning “hike,” and “dun," a fort.

In 1921 the vessels launched in the Tyne were 64 of 209,106 tons, compared with 78 vessels of 213,680 tons in 1920.

Briar pipes have replaced the clays, now no longer given free in English public-houses, with one or two exceptions. A genuine banknote, lightly folded, will bear a weight upwards of 501 b., so strong is the paper on which it is printed.

The bronze sword of Siekfried has been stolen from lit# bake of the Bismarck statue in front of the Reichstag in Berlin. It is reported that a great deal of war material and German aeroplanes are being shipped front Rotterdam to Russia.

Two thousand Glasgow students collected nearly £5,000 for the unemployed by a masquerade in the streets of the city.

Forged paper money recently detected in France.-had been buried in the ground for a fortnight to give it a used, dirty, look. By substituting niochnnioallydrawn vehicles for liorse traction, Holborn Borough Council have saved £2,000 in a year.

A number of the Crown’s swans in the Richmond district have died from the effects of oil from a sunken barge in the Thames. Further invesligjvt ions in Ceylon coastal waters have led to ilie discovery of new pearl oyster banks between Negombo and Cltilaw.

Australia is shortly to-consider a proposal to bury an Unknown Warrior at Canberra, the new capital of the Commonwealth. Mrs Winch and Miss .Jackson, two ex-Mayoresses of Rochester, have been appointed the first women magistrates of that city. Gold wedding rings are favourite investments among London’s coster women, as they are easily carried and quickly converted into cash. Every summer for 33 years an official “bird-watcher” lias been on duty in a solitary hut at the northeast extremity of the Shetland Islands.