NEWS IN BRIEF

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 2828, 30 December 1924, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF

A roast ostrich 3ft-. long and weighing 301 b. was among the dishes served at a dinner party given by some Australians in London recently. The ostrich was sent from Australia in a block of ice and was cooked on a spit before an open hearth.

“A tour of cinema operators has been arranged for the Dominion,” said the Hon. G. J. Anderson in a Speech at Otautau, “and they will spend some time in Southland. e have arranged for them to come through about February, which is considered the best month. The operators will visit all parts of Southland, including Lakes Te Anna and Maanpouri.” Employees of the Northern Pacific Railway 7 Company 7 , of America, have just been insured for £lO,000,000. The premiums are paid .by the company, and the policies, which fall due at death or if the employee is totally incapacitated before sixty 7, are issued to the employees after a probationary term of service.

Mr. Alfred E. Moore, Director of the College of Pestology, has been experimenting, with flies with a view to lessening their number. He sfiys the experiments proved conclusively that certain flies possess weak temperaments, • others assertive, while some are decidedly aggressive. The more aggressive and assertive possess a resistance to crease in direct ratio to their truculence.

When working in the Haywood Rectory gardens, near King’s Lynn recently, a mail named Knight picked up a bomb which had been unearthed by pigs, and it exploded in his hand. His arm and hand were injured, and another man standing near by _was stunned. Knight, who served during the war for four years, thought the grenade was one used for extinguishing fires. 'The,Royal Exchange was founded by Sir Thomas Gresham and a grasshopper was his family crest. Formerly the- Old Royal Exchange had a number of grasshoppers decorating it in different parts. It is thought that this creature was selected for a crest as a pun on the name of Gresham, gre of groes being An-glo-Saxon for grass. The story of Gresham being rescued from death bv the chirping of a grasshopper is a legend. It would fake nearly thirty-five years for an aeroplane travelling at two miles a minute, to fly from the earth to Mars., It would take eightynine years bo the sun and twenty million years to the nearest star; yet a wireless signal could travel to Mars and back in less than seven minutes.

Seward Glacier,, in Alaska, fifty miles long, three miles wide, is the largest in the world whose size is delnitely known. The longest glacier in the Alps is ten miles long, and several in the Caucasus Mountains are larger than that. In Greenland there are glaciers longer than Hie Seward Glacier.

The necessity of the drastic reform of the bankruptcy laws was emphasised by Mr 11. H. Spencer, at the annual dinner of the Bradford Textile Society, - recently. He said that during: 1 the past four years bankruptcies and liquidations in the textile trade showing evidence of fraud amounted to £25,000,000. /Originally the penny was a silver coin 240 of which weighed a pound, in imitation of the Roman den urns. This is why fli_e 240t;h part of a pound Troy is called a penny-weight. The; Anglo-Saxon “scylling” was of the :value of fivepence but. when in llic sixteenth century shillings came to be coined they were reckoned as tlic twentieth part of a pound sterling, which was equal to twelve pence.