NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3618, 26 March 1927, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Buckingham Palace contains something like 500 rooms. Londoners paid £2,500,000 in motor taxation last year. In a silkworm’s cocoon there are from 500 to 1200 yards of silk. London pilots earn an average of £IOO a year, and channel pilots £l,218. Nearly all snowflakes are shaped in some variation of a six-pointed star. Approximately 15,000,000 bananas are consumed every day in the United States. A field ant has been known to hold in its jaws a weight 3000 times heavier than itself.

The earth is likely to be struck by a comet only once in 20,000,000 years, scientists declare. Property in the W’est End of London is still held on leases granted three or four centuries ago. Twice as many victims are claimed annually by man-made electricity as by nature’s lightning. in front of the Gravesend Conservative Club workmen unearthed human hones at least 250 years old. Women are excluded from industries in Britain in which they would be in danger of lead poisoning. Parasites usually form the nucleus of pearls about which several delicate layers of material-are deposited. People who seek to adopt children always seen to favour girl babies; boys are not nearly so popular. A hammer which picks up its own tack and holds it in place while one knocks it in is worked by magnetism. , London, with its 7,000,005 inhabitants, has a police force of 20,000 men and 000 detectives, one of whom is a woman. Paper yarn from wood pulp is now being woven into carpets and rugs of different colours which can be washed. Fur seals are among the greatest rovers in the world, animals marked in the Arctic having been found in the Antarctic. Aluminium blocks and porcelain studs are to be used for the traffic markings in and around Trafalgar Square, London. Coal shipments from Swansea during October were 20 tons, as compared with 292,000 tons in October of the previous year. So strong isjilvwood relatively to its lightness that aeroplanes’ bodies are now made of only five pieces ot plywood, each 50ft. long. During the seven years the crosschannel air services have been in operation, British air liners have flown more than 7,000,000 miles. In Durham early marriages are Ihe rule. A larger proportion of Unpeople in that ciounty are married than almost anywhere else in the country. Chess .figures, carved from bones as big as a man’s fist, and said to date back to the tenth century, are now on show in the British Museum. Great Britain is still the leader, the centre, and the envy of the world; and it is up to you all to keep her in that supremely proud position. This view was expressed recently by Mr. L. B. Beale, bis Majesty’s Trade Commissioner, at an address on “Empire Trade” at the Rotary Club luncheon in "Wellington.