NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2516, 9 December 1922, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

A bird eating spider recently laid 200 eggs in the London Zoo; it is the first time this lias happened. One meal a day in summer and two in winter, of properly selected food, should suffice the normal person. “Housework is an infallible cure tor neurasthenia and hysterical women,” says a well-known physician. Character dolls are so,popular among .society women in New York and Paris that they are ousting lap dogs. Coins to the number of 400,000 pass daily through the final examining room at the Royal Mint in London. Luton with “six millionaires and 48 semi-millionaires” was recently described as the wealthiest town in Britain. Paper money issued in Great Britain in 1014 amounted to £28,000,000. In 1920 this had risen to £l,040,200,000. Equal to one-third of the annual world output in iron and steel, rust and corrosion cause a loss of £500,000,000 every year. Where tattooing is popular an expert can earn as much as £1 a night as some of the designs cost up-to 10s or 12s each. To frustrate jewel thieves, novel cases, shaped like fruit, are now being made for the concealment ol precious jewellery. Coal briquettes recently sent from Germany to a French merchant were found to be stamped: “Gott Strafe England, 1915.” A mulberry tree, still growing in the city of London and bearing a crop of fruit every year is sai l to date back to before 1060. Having had a ring placed on its claw near Windsor in August 1921, a swallow was caught in South Africa in 4a mi ary of this year. By a benefaction from-thc Carnegie trustees, most of the elementary schools in Buckinghamshire have received consignments of books. The average London schoolboy s health is better than that of the schoolgirl, probably due to the greater amount of outdoor exercise he gets.

Earning his living by playing a tin whistle, an Englishman is walking from London to Constantinople, a distance of about 1,500 miles. Linen for 25 mark notes, silk for 50 marks, and embroidered silk for 100 marks, is a suggestion made m Westphalia, Germany. To prevent the risk of floods from the building of a reservoir a town in Ohio has been moved to a new site two miles fi'om its old situation. The first round-the-world voyage was made in 1522. Five vessels set out, with 280 officers and men. but only one vessel and 31 men retui - ned. Six conversations can be earned on simultaneously over one telephone wire by means of a new instrument designed by a French postal official. To win a wager, .John H. Bryant an unemployed Deptford man, dived 80ft. into the Thames from London Bridge and swam to Old Swan Pier. James Lucas, an elderly labourer, of Broadwell, Gloucestershire, fell from a rick and was impaled on a standing pitchfork, and died irom blood poisoning. To stop motorists from racing about the roads, the villagers round 1 teauville, a fashionable French seaside resort, have dug ' shallow trenches across the roads. “You were quite right to take rum for a cold; it is the best cure,” said Mr Syminoiis, in discharging a woman charged at Marylebone with being drunk. A machine which wraps up 1,500 loaves an hour, sealing them in waxed paper without _ their being touched by human hands cently exhibited-in J,cjrKton. A. perfect-fig-osir of a wasp, identical in colour and form with the insect we know to-day has been found in Colorado; it is supposed to be thousands of years old. Forty-four Chertsey and Hurley anglers fished at Ilorley (after the visitors had travelled across Surrey) for seven hours, and (he only “captures” were two small fish. Hospital patients are now kept under observation by a new Followup Department at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, so that their cures may be properly finished. Hell) for the crew of a hydroplane which fell into the sea oil Cape Antibes recently was brought by means of a carrier pigeon which the pilot of the damaged plane bad with him.