NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2623, 23 August 1923, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The Fratellini Brothers, the famous French clowns, have opened a school for clowns in France, which will supply all the circuses in Europe.

Viscount Leverhulme, speaking to his employees at Port Sunlight the other day, said that “the hobby of collecting was the greatest joy of life.”

Included in the contingent of the 2nd Battalion City of London Regiment which recently marched to Brighton, was a boy drummer, aged fourteen.

Sir Edward Grigg, the Secretary of the Rhodes’ Scholarship Trust, states that in the course of 20 years 1000 Rhodes scholars had gone out into the world.

As an alternative to sixty days in prison, a New York judge has ordered an incorrigible youth to report at police headquarter's at seven o’clock every morning. Experiments have beeen carried out in the United State, of evaporating foggy clouds by dropping electrically charged showers of sand on them from aeroplanes. In the near future it is thought by scientists that it will be possible to examine the condition of steel plates as much as twelve inches thick, by means of X-ray. The French wine-growers are on the eve of a crisis, owing to the loss of foreign markets. Large stocks are on their hands for which buyers at reasonable prices cannot be obtained. Over 300 blind people are being trained as gardeners in England by the Guild of Blind Gardeners, which was founded by a lady, herself sightless, who was a keen gardener. The British Post Office on April 1, had a staff of 181,173; it is the only Civil Service department in England 'with a smaller staff than in pre-war days. Although the personnel of the British Army and Navy is about 40000 less than in 1913-14, the annual cost to the country of these services is nearly £60,000,000 more. Owing to the drained area and the artificial warmth of the city, London would be freer from fogs than the country round it if the smoke nuisance could be cured. Photographic transmission of telegrams is to be tried in France. By this method copies of a message of the sender’s own handwriting will be delivered to the addressee. Girls who remain at elementary schools till the age of 14 are more apt to develop round shoulders than are boys, as they grow faster and do not take as much exercise. Attempts are to be made this summer to recover the £5,000,000 in bullion which was lost in the Lusitania, torpedoed by the Germans in 1915. A big brown owl attacked a, Bedfordshire woman recently, pecking at her hair and eyes so savagely that an operation on the latter was necessary. The new aquarium at the London Zoo is expected to be ready by the end’ of October. Experts say it will be the finest aquarium in Europe. Household pets are losing their populai’ity among children. Boys especially are now more interested

in wireless and other mechanical apparatus. St. Kilda, Britain’s most remote island with a population of 80 souls is cut oft' for about eight months in the year by the stormy seas on its rocky shores. Two lines of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” spoken by the late Lord Tennyson, are recorded on a phonograph record owned by a South African.