NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2973, 10 December 1925, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES.

Mr. Eric Bertram Hibbert, whose father was the first mayor of Mansfield, England, in 1891, is to be the mayor next year. Climbing down a rope ladder at midnight, a Buckingshire man rescued a foxhound which had fallen into a well. A grandson of Robert Southey, who was Poet Laureate at the time of Waterloo, is in the workhouse infirmary at Swansea. Seeing a bedroom in flames the driver and conducter got oil an Aldershot omnibus and used their fire extinguisher with good effect. A nunjias travelled 500 miles by canoe and train to consult a dentist. She belonged to the order of Grey Nuns at the Mission of Notre Dame of the Sacred Heart in the hinterland of Northern Saskatchewan, and it was her first contact with civilisation for five years. Samples of milk taken by municipal authorities in Britain go to prove that adulteration occurs more frequently on Sundays than on other days. The assumption is that there is a greater demand on that day, and there is a tendency to increase the supply to meet it by adding water.

As a result of electric light wires coming into contact with telephone wires in several places in the borough of New Plymouth (states the “News”), a number of shocks were received by operators in- the telephone exchange. One shock was severe enough to cause a lady operator to collapse, and she had to he taken into the retiring room, where she remained for some time before she was able to resume work. Por medical students to live at home the cost of their training to become a doctor at a London hospital is estimated at about £OO a year for live and u-half years. This, of course, does not include maintenance, clothes, pocket-money, or railway fares but allows examination fees, books and instruments. In connection with the preparation of Aeheson graphite, it is remarkable that the inventor found the key to the method in the Bible, where we read that the Egyptians used straw in the process of making bricks, writes Dr. A. G. Brown, of the Royal Technical College, in the Glasgow Herald. While reading the account- of .the trials of the Israelites, of how they complained bitterly that bricks could not be made without straw, it is difficult to realise that they were faced with a problem iii colloid chemistry. Such,

however, was the case. It was the practice to soak straw in water for some time, and to us this liquid in working up the clay, because the resultant mass was found by experience to he much more plastic and easily worked than if water alone had been used. It was the presence of this tannin in the straw infusion which brought about the increased plasticity. It is still the practice to add tannin to clay when an increase in plasticity is desired.