NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 2994, 4 February 1926, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Male mosquitoes do not bite human beings.

The lungs of the average man contain about five quarts of air. Eleven cubic feet of water, when frozen, makes twelve cubic feet of ice.

Mr. Lloyd George has been given the freedom ctf 35 English boroughs. One seed potato, cut into slices, produced 2111 b. in an Ilkeston garden.

Toads, bats, and snakes can live longer without food than any other creatures.

A Plymouth boy who learned to swim last year has saved two lives from drowning.

The King has approved the granting of ; a Royal Charter to the League of Nations Union. The fir tree is the commonest of all trees, and is found in every part of tlie world. Mr. and Mrs Gould, a Worcestershire couple, have lived in the same house for 60 years. In the storeroom of a ship which caught fire, hundreds of eggs were found cooked and fit for eating.

Correspondence between Hungarian students and their tutors can now be sent by cheap post. An American has given £20,000 for the maintenance of John Wesley’s Chapel and grave in City Road, London. The war memorial at Horeforth, Yorkshire, is an avenue of 212 trees, each bearing the name of a fallen soldier. Many Venetian gondolas are fitted with broadcast receivers. The programmes from Rome and Vienna are picked up. at good strength. Among insects, the most- intelligent are those of the ant tribe, while next to them rank wasps. Bees come some way lower down the scale. . . Students of nineteen nationalities are now studying the English language by a scientific method at. University College, London, Swedes usually prove the best students. The whole of the Bible has been written in Braille by Mr. I< ord, himself blind, who has been for fifty years prof-reader and stereotyper to the National Institute for the blind

Schoolboys of 20 years ago were better mathematicians than those of to-day, according to an eminent educationist. He states that the present-day scholars have too many distractions. Individual drinking cups, made of papier niache, can be obtained for one halfpenney from an automatic machine . placed near the drinking fountain at Euston Station, London. In a new large aeroplane now being built to carry 30 passengers, as well, as a big cargo, an office, complete with a trained typist, is being installed for the convenience of business men.

At the beginning of the can-manu-facturing business in America, the work was done by hand and 60 were considered a good day’s work for one man. Now a large factory can turn out 9,000,000 a week. Beefsteaks made from cottonseeds are forecast by Dr. Davis Neeson. “It is only a question of time,” lie said, “before chemists discover how to produce a meat substitute from the seed.”

Cats employed in the destruction of mice and rats at the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway sack depot at Trent, are listed as official servants of the company, and allowed a regular ration of milk.

A motor-car dealer is experimenting with a ear that is controlled entirlcy by radio impulses from another car. A 'complicated system of relays is used to actuate the steering mechanism, gears, and brakes. A loai. was recently found in a baker’s shop in Herculaneum, still retaining its form, and with his name stamped upon. That loaf is supposed to have been baked B.C. 79, and is therefore nearly 2000 years old.

In preparation for the season of goodwill among men Canada exports Christpias trees to the United States every year. It was announced last year that there would be a duty of 10 per cent, at the frontier. Mr. John Cousins* aged ninety, who was buried at Church Crookham, Hampshire, took part in the battle of Inkerman and the siege of Sebastopol, and was nursed by Florence Nightingale. There are too many “frills” in education to-day, according to Lord Eustace Percy, President of the British Board, of Education. He agreed to a great extent to limiting the training more to the “three R’s” and domestic instruction.

There is not now a single living descendant of the male line of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Moore, Addison, Swift, Gibbon, Macaulay, Hogarth, or Sir Joshua Reynolds. As a guide to investors, the London County .Council has suggested to the Institute of Patentees that two subjects needing attention are a cheap form of nou=splintering glass, and tram rails that will stand the weight, speed, and braking of modern rolling stock.

A Danish schooner recently arrived at Aberdeen with a meteoric stone found in Greenland. It weighs about seven tons. The discoverey was made in 1918 when it was lying on the edge of a rock alyiut 400 ft. high. It is the third largest meteoric stone knowji, and is worth £lO,000.

The easiest military book in the War Oilice library is dated 1573. It is entitled: Certayne Wayes for the Ordering of Souldiers in Battleray, and Setting of Battayles, after Divers Fashions, with Their Manor

jof Hardline; and also Figures 1 of Certayne Newe Plaltes for Fortification of Town, etc.”

For the past two years the night staff at Brandamore Station (United States) have been hearing European wireless programmes by listening at one of the ordinary railway telephones. , Apart from the five-mile stretch of wire acting as an aerial, and an ordinary telephone receiver, there is nothing wireless about the equipment. La Marguerite, once famous as a cross-channel steamer, and later for her war service, is in the hands of tiie shipbreakers. The first troops she carried across the chamicd, in March, 1915, were the 6th City of London Rifles, and this regiment now possesses, by way of souvenir, the ship’s bell of this historic steamer.

In an address on the subject of spirit guardianship, the Rev. G. Vale Owen told a story of John Wesley, who, having in his possession a sum of money, was waylaid by thieves, whose intentions were frustrated by the perceiving, as they thought, that he whs accompanied by two horse-men, presumably his guardian angels, who had assumed human form.