NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 30504, 29 June 1926, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Shillings contain silver to the value of l:,'d. In 1025 waste tinfoil realised the sum. of £1228. The annual rainfall in the Khasi Hills averages 458 in. Smoking was first allowed on the Underground in 1874. A modern herring boat costs £12,000 to build and equip. The king cobra, found in India, grows to a length of 15ft. There are 3,000,000 volumes in (he British Museum library. There are about 475,000,000 inhabitants on the earth at present. The bubonic plague killed oft' onequarter of the world’s population in 1348.

According to statistics England is the most crowded country in the world. .

Recent soundings place the greatest depth of the Mediterranean at 14,430 ft. It is claimed that cut flowers kept in rain water last longer than if in tap water. Inmates of the British Poor Law Institutes cost £155 each annually to maintain.

Between 7000 and SOOO deaths by drowning are recorded every year in the United States.

The amount deposited in the British Post Office Savings Bank is approximately £208,000,000. Instruments for recording the weather have been sent nearly five miles high by means of kites. Eight thousand buffalo were rounded up in Canada recently to create “atmosphere” for a cinema film.

A man of 48 told the Black-bourn magistrate recently that he was unable to read a footpath notice. For the relief of rates, £50,000 will be available this year from Nottingham gas department and tramways.

Tung oil, an important ingredient, in the manufacture of pain/s and varnish, is produced from trees in Florida: The Market Bosworth workhouse inmates chose fruit in preference to beer with their last Christmas din-

The Danube flows through countries in which, fifty-two languages and dialects are spoken. It is 2000 miles in length. Sulphate of ammonia is being produced from the air at works near Stockton at .the rate of one hundred tons a day.

Gramophone records are being used by a German bird fancier to teach young canaries how to sing like nightingales.

At a fire at Beneden National Sanatorium, in Kent, a fireman was frozen to the top of a ladder and had to be sawn off.

The two largest hoists in the world are now in use in Canada. They can raise 560 tons of ore an hour from a depth of 3200 ft.

To celebrate his sixtieth birthday, Finland increased the pension of Jan Sibelius, her famous composer, to about £SOO a year. A German engineer has designed a monorial wheelbarrow. He states that the energy to push it is lessened by three-fourths.

The Bank of England possesses it own water supply, and the bullion department is submerged every night in several feet of water..

The Aberdeen Town Council has decided to follow Glasgow by ordering that no alcohol shall.be provided at any of its official functions,

The London and North-Eastern thousand horses assist in the delivRaihvay possesses 7000 engines and 7000 miles of nail-road. Five cry of goods.

Fibrous material which makes good paper is obtained in Jamaica from the banana palm after the tree has been cut down and the fruit harvested.

A British inspector of' physical training recently announced that this .section of the education of children was deficient in almost 80 per cent, of the schools he visited. So large is the dome of the new building of the Port of London Authority that a small railway has been built round the’ outside of it to simplify the cleaning of its windows.

Capable of furnishing enough steam to develop electrical energy approximating 400 million kilowatt hours a year, a volcano in Bolivia has been anounced “for sale or rent.” The local authorities of Bo’uess, Linlithgowshire, are taking steps to

restore and preserve, the small house, situated on the Kinnoll Estate, in which James Walt perfected his model of the steam engine in 1708. / Sound-proof cabinets which enclose all but the key-board, earerage of 84J gollon, while in Birlevers of a certain make of typewriter, have been designed to decrease noise in offices and to protect the machines.

There is reason for believing that the name of the City of Liverpool signifies simply the pool where small trading vessels “livered,” or delivered, their cargoes. To “liver” a ship, in eastern Scotland, is to discharge her cargo. Rome consumes 110 gallons of water per head of the population each day, while in London the consumption is only 35J gallons. In New York each citizen uses an average of 84 i gallins, while in Birmingham this is only 26J gallons.