NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2556, 17 March 1923, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Crabs chew their food with their

legs. There are 11,000 rooms in the Vatican. More than 1,000 varieties of wheat are known. Eighty per cent, of weather forecasts are correct. There are twenty-four peeresses in their own right. Cumberland is the wettest county in England. The capital of the Bank of England is £14,533,000. Yellow is the most permanent of any colour in flowers. There are eighteen universities in Great Britain and Ireland. Silkworms were first reared by a Chinese empress 4,500 years ago. Smoking in the street was onee an offenee punishable by fine. St. Paul’s Cathedral covers an area of two and a-quarter acres. The chief wine cellar of the House of Commons is 200 ft. long. Every square mile of the ocean has a population of 120,000,000 fish. Foreigners naturalised during 1921 in Great Britain numbered 1053. A south African species of snake lives almost exclusively <<n birds eggs. The average depth of the Pacific is 2,500 fathoms: of the Atlantic 2200 fathoms. Women jurors served for the first time in England at Bristol on July 23, 1920. In proportion to its si/.e, the fly walks nearly thirty-five times as fast as a human being. Nearly 20,000,000 tons of coal were shipped from South Wales ports last year. The first patent for cutting screws hv machinery was obtained by Wyatt in 1700.’ Housing accommodation is provided for 22,000 people hv the Peabody Trust in London. Analysts siiv that butter is the most nutritious article of diet, and that bacon comes next. The United States has over 1800 public libraries, containing more than fifteen million volumes. The first tunnel over a mile in length in England was that at Ilorncastle, constructed 1872. Linoleum is made of powdered cork, oil, and resin, spread upon canvas under steam at high pressure. New York’s highest structure, the Woolworth buildings, 792 ft. high, eosl £3,000,000 to erect. There were men of colour in the Coldstream and other English military hands up to the year 1840. In a . single dav a piano showroom in New York sold 290 pianos, all of which were actually on view.