NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3726, 6 December 1927, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

In Baltimore there is a monument to Adam. There are 152,735 miles of roads in Grat Britain. There are 2,300,000 payers of in-come-tax in Britain. The greater part of Britain wage earners earn about 50/- a week.

White ants have been known to lay eggs at the rate of 80,000 a day for a month. Last year nearly 300,000,000 gallons of milk were transported by rail in Great Britain. Strings in tennis racquets intended for winter use should' be thicker than in the summer. ■ It takes the selected gut from at least eight sheep to string a tennis racquet of good quality. Birds of a fairy-like shade of blue recently reached the London Zoo. They came from Java. Fuel oil weighing 5000 tons is burned on the Aquitania, one of the largest liners, in one trip across the Atlantic. The feet of Englishwomen are wider than those of Americans, but narrower than those of the women of Scotland. A newly-born boy baby has now expectation of life of about 551 years, compared with 481 years 21 years ago. The London and North Eastern railway engines travel 167,000,000 miles a year, equal to 350 return trips to the moon. The first famous singer to broadcast was Caruso, the Italian tenor, who sang from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in 1909. Twelve countries of North and South America would be linked up by the great road, 7000 miles-long, suggested by 'President Coolidge. A Kansas city jewellery firm reclaims £6OO a year in precious metals by filtering the water, in which its employees wash their hands. A sparrow recently flew through the open window of a house at Melton Mowbray, laid an egg in a saucepan, and then flew out again. ' :So many young business women in Britain are now insuring themselves that most of the companies have had to provide special facilities.

iShoes intended for the different parts of England vary in shape and style; what would be a popular model in Yorkshire would not suit, the 'south. To warn motorists that he is aliout to cross the road, a Southampton man sounds a small but powerful motor horn, which is fixed to his walking stick. Street cleaning costs Britain ten milliop pounds every year, the local cost varying from £1 4s lOd a ton of refuse removed at Halifax to 4/6 a ton at Dudley. Certain towns in Northumberland and Durham have the highest death-rate in England. The lowest are to be found in rural districts of the Eastern Counties. Honey has been stored by bees inside the roof of a fifteenth century farmhouse near Dorking, Surrey, for over a century. The weight is now so great that the ceiling is showing signs of collapse. People who live in houses of a rateable value of less than £8 a year in Britain may obtain a free license to brew beer for their own use up to,.four bushels of malt. Stated to be the smallest in the world, a wonderful miniature Indian carpet, 34in. long and 21in. wide, has been presented to the Victoria am: Albert Museum, South Kensington. Tapestries dating back to the middle of the sixteenth century and a mono - the finest specimens of this art are to be seen in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey. The oldest railway in the world, the Mumbles Railway at Swansea, is to be electrified. It was opened in 1807, and for seventy years horse-drawn trains plied its fivemile track.