NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3037, 18 May 1926, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Amon" British voters there are eleven men to every eight women. The tone of a piano is best when the instrument is not near a wall.

The average number of lia'irs on an adult’s head is from 129,000 to 150,000. London’s tube railways cost from £BOO,OOO to £1,000,000 a mile to construct.

Glycerine has the property, extraordinary among liquids, of not evaporating. The London General Omnibus Company’s vehicles cover 801 miles of roads.

Measels is said to occur in waijes in London at intervals of rather less than two years.

At Liskeard a house fell down half an hour after the occupants had removed with their furniture.

Over £700,000 has been collected in various parts of the world to honour Lord Kitchener’s memory. A Sunday survey in the city of Washington found 7000 people in church and 50,000 in the theatres.

There are now more than 5000 war memorials altogether in Great Britain and on the battlefields. American visitors to London are estimated to spend about £20,000,000 in the metropolis each year. Dancing is now so popular that it is estimated that about 50,000 Londoners enjoy this pastime every night. Widow’s war pensions granted in Britain between August, 1914, and March of last year amounted to 248,367. London telephone users are responsible for nearly half the total average number of daily calls in the United Kingdom. The famous Johns Hopkins Medical School at Baltimore has started a farm to raise monkeys for experimental work. An octogenarian cooper stated in England the other day that lie had knocked nails into barrels “all day long since 1859.” Ice, harvested from a lake •at Ashton-under-Lyne, is stored in underground cellars, where it keeps for six or eight months. Jewells belonging to the public can be submitted for tests as to their genuineness to the Museum of Practical Geology in London. One of the most regular attendants at Helpston Council School, Northamptonshire, is a jackdaw, which accompanies one of the scholars. The longest walk ever performed in 24 hours is 127 miles 1210 yards. The feat was accomplished a good many years ago by a walker named Howes. A couple, fined 5s each at Enfield, were singing in the street, the woman having a “baby”—which proved to be only a bundle of clothes —in a perambulator. Dental tests for candidates for the Royal Navy are pretty severe. Five missing teeth and faults in others will mean rejection in the case of boys under 17. Exercises to gramophone music are employed at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, for improving the muscles of the feet and legs and curing such ailments as flat feet. The flying lemur of the Indian Archipelago, which is only 30in. long, can leap fully 300 ft. by the use of one membrane connecting its limbs with each other. Some of the best mannequins in the leading Paris dress saloons are English girls, who have taken French names, just as British dancers fancy Russian stage names. The motor vehicle of Great Britain have increased by 140,394 in the last year, without counting trams and trade licenses. Motorcycles account for 50,000 of the increase. Four blind shorthand-typists, engaged in a temporary capacity by the London County Council in 1924, have done so well that their transfer to the permanent staff is suggested. High above the River Thames, in one of the arches of the Tower Bridge, there is a cosy flat of four rooms, occupied by a bridge official, who has to climb 86 steps to go home.

The first potatoes were cultivated in the Andes, somewhere between San Diego, Chile, and Lima, Peru. Potatoes still grow wild in the mountain districts of South America.