NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 2761, 22 July 1924, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Believed to dale front about 4500 8.C., the oldest example of man’s handwriting Ims been discovered during the excavations at Ur of the Chaldees. A marble tablet, inscribed in Sumerian, was found in a temple believed to have been built bv a ruler of the dvnnstv after the Flood. America is justly proud of the railway systems that girdle her vast territories. Her railway power plant now totals 100 million horse-power. This plant consists of (55,000 locomotives, costing over a million pounds a day to operate. Last year they consumed 140 million pounds' worth of coal.

A seven-year-old collie recently returned to a term in the Cumberland fells from Liverpool, a hundred miles away. Xo satisfactory explanation has ever been offered for this faculty, although some people have ventured the opinion that lhe dog has a kind of second sight, •if which humans know nothin"'. Seaweed has a commercial value. Hundreds of thousands of tuns are Used every year in England as manuri —especially in Corn wall—-and it i- also used by chemists for the manufacture of iodine, and broruMusic is more effieaeious than medicine in the treatmf*nt of certain diseases, stale- a well-known lady doctor, who quotes old Italian records to show that music was used lo save patients from the results of viper and tarantula bit--11 is only for the last 500 years or so fhal the English language has been used for lettcr-writing. Earlier Ilian that Kreneh was the 'nnguage of correspondence. and before the reign of Edward T. all letters were written in Latin. Tn China the cobbler roams from house to house, announcing his approach with a rattle. When culled by those wln> need his services, be does Ids work at llie homes id patri.ns: und. if lhe job is n lung one, boards with them until it i~ done.

The late-t enumeration of the animals known to science includes mi fewer than 080.000 recogiii-ed species. The reel number is believtn be very much larger. ft lias been estimated that of insects alone the earth harbours 2,000,000 species.