NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3694, 22 September 1927, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Bobbed hair has been the fashion among Albanian women for 2000 years.

There are 40,000 muscles in an elephant’s trunk and only 527 in a man’s body. .

The drone bee is stated to have 13,800 eyes, the worker bee 6400, the queen bee. only 4900. As a preventive of colds, workers in Japanese rice fields wear stockings of human hair. It takes five bushels of grain—the yield of a quarter of an acre — to make one sack of flour. Motor lifeboats of the smallest type cost £4500 to build; sailing lifeboats cost £2OOO each.

Public houses in England and Wales have decreased by nearly 20,000 in the last 22 years. A fountain pen filler has been used to feed a London baby which 1 weighed only lib". 6oz.'at birth.

A locomotive whistle uses four tons of water and 1200 lb. of coal for every hour of continuous operation.

In the new design for the money of the Irish Free State there appear a hen, a sow, a hare, and a salmon. In North China it is not uncommon for new-born Chinese babies to have green eyes and light red hair.

Plant life cannot exist more than 600 feet below the sea, but animal life has been found at a depth of four miles. (Silver and bronze coins do not cost their face value to make, so there is a handsome profit for the Royal Mint. British girls are now from six to nine pounds lighter, in proportion to their height, than the girls of 40 years ago.

The slaving habit is sti’ong in Canada, where the deposits in banks work out at £3l per head of the total population.

The shortest war was that declared by the Sultan of Zanzibar against Great Britain in 1893.. It lasted forty minutes.

“Native” used to denote an inhabitant of India, is forbidden to Civil Servants / or servants of the Crown in that country.

Sea-lions, which are of no commercial value, are to be reduced by machine-gun fire from Canadian Government steamer.

Britain consumes, on an average, 110 eggs every year for each one of the population. Of these more than half are imported. 'Gold wire has been drawn! so fine that it weighs one ounce to 3500 yards, and makes human hair look coarse and thick by comparison.

Diamonds can be identified by means of ultra-violet rays, under which the stones give off various colours that can be photographed. Last year there were 23,415 inspections of milk shops, 12,309 inspections of restaurants, and 7317 inpeetions of ice-cream shops in London.

Part of the Bristol Channel, where it is 20 miles wide, is beyond the jurisdiction of the British Courts and outside the British realm.

London’s own Spa is at Streatham, within five miles of Piccadilly. Here, in an old well-house built in 1659, people can “take the waters.”