NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3733, 22 December 1927, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

A Zulu woman may not call her husband by bis name, either when addressing him or when speaking of him to others. She must use the phrase “father of So-and-so.” There are only two tobacco plantation's in England, one being in Hampshire and covering twenty acres. The leaves are made into cigars, cigarettes, and pipe tobacco. i

(Between 25,000 and 30,000 persons in Britain benefit from the Act which entitles blind wireless listeners who are properly registered to be excused payment of the annual license fee.

According to a scientist, the average amount of absolute rest during a night’s sleep is only eleven and a-half minutes, there being muscular or mental action during the remainder of the time. Since 1870 the average death rate in England and Wales has fallen from 22 per 1000 to 12 per 1000. The decrease in the infantile death rate in the same period has been from 150 to 75 per 1000 births. “Ladies” of the British Royal Court now consist of the Mistress of the Robes, Ladies of the Bedchamber, and Maids of Honour. Four of the Women of the Bedchamber act as Queen Mary’s secretaries.

A little boy died at Bryncoch, Glamorganshire, recently, aftereating wild celery. Wild celery is found -in Britain and in most parts of Europe, in ditches and brooks, especially near the sea and in saline soils.

“The greatest ambassador of trade is the Prince of Wales. He •sells the Empire’ to every foreign country he visits. He opens the gate of trade by personality,” said a prominent London business man recently.

.Scrap metal, including old bicycle spokes and bits of sheet metal, have been used by a pair of pigeons for building their nest in the yard of a Greenwich metal merchant. The finished article weighs about 221 b. In the course of an inspection of a mail liner in the Napier roadstead., a newspaper man, delving in the mysteries of the big ship’s up-to-date dairy, learned one of the inner secrets —how ship’s cream is made. An obliging official of the boat explained the process by which 51bs. of dried milk are added to three times that amount of butter and several gallons of water. The whole is then heated to 140 deg. and thoroughly mixed in a rotating cylinder. It is then put through a separator, and lo and behold cream comes out of one spout and milk out of the other. Two minutes later the passengers in the commodious dining saloon of the vessel are having cream on their sweets, even though the boat may be many weeks from the nearest land.