NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2894, 9 June 1925, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The Royal College of Surgeons lias in its museum a rib of Robert Bruce. It has also a piece of the body of Napoleon.

A lecturer stated the other day that the servants of Henry the First considered one shilling and a penny a good day’s wages. A thousand-year-old oak tree has been cut down in the park of the Chateau de la Montague at St. Honore-les-Bains, France. The weather in Transcaucasia has been so severe during the past winter that (17 people and 27,000 cattle have been frozen to death. Pygmy mice, which come from Africa, are so small that a family of them could be comfortably housed in an ordinary matchbox. One of the big Atlantic liners has a tailor's shop fitted up so that a passenger can select goods and have a suit made on the voyage. The fact that he was engrossed in a cross-word puzzle was the excuse of the president at a St. Paneras traders’ dinner for not having prepared a speech. The largest stone arch in England is at Chester, its span being 200 feet. The centre arch of Southwark bridge, London, which is of iron, is a 240-feet span. Twenty-one sentences, amounting in all to about 300 years, have been passed by a Spanish court of law on a municipal officer accused of false book-keeping. Women in Jersey were legally regarded as “chattels” till February of this year, when Jersey States passed a form of the English-nam-ed Women’s Property Act. Less tobacco is being consumed in Britain than formerly. In 1920 nearly 149,000,0001 b. were smoked; in 1923 this quantity, had decreased to 132,000,0001 b. There are over 400,000 lingerprints recorded at Scotland Yard. Since the Bureau was started in 1901, over 250,000 criminals have been identified by this means. The world’s longest railway platform, the total length of which is 2175 ft., has been erected through the linking up of the Victoria and Exchange stations at Manchester. Anybody who is British born can buy the Freedom of the City of London. A proposer and seconder and payment of certain fees are all that is required. It costs less than £5.

A girl baby born in the Royal East Sussex Hospital weighed exactly 3Alb. and was 12in. long. She was fed with a fountain pen tiller, her meal being two teaspoonfuls of milk. Paris and London wireless concerts have been heard clearly at Sarafand, twelve miles north of ancient Tyre. Sarafand is really Zaraphath, or Zarpeta, where Elijah’s widow lived. There are so many doctors qualifying in Britain each year that thousands cannot get any work. A recent estimate was that at least 5000 out-of-work doctors are on the poverty line to-day. Plant for obtaining oil and other products from colliery waste coal L being manufactured by Messrs. Vickers, Ltd., Barrow-in-Furness, for the Burghlee Colliery, Loanhead, Midlothian. Rats, both brown and grey, have been found living with rabbits in their warrans by a Lincolnshire rat-catcher, who has even found a weasel, on one occasion, sharing the home of his usual prey.