NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3841, 6 September 1928, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

There are 20,314 miles of railway in Great Britain. The only fish that never sleep are the salmon, pike, and goldfish. London has now about 900 detectives. In 1877 there were 15. It costs £l2O a year to feed an elephant in the London Zoo. There was one divorce for. every five marriages in Chicago last year. There are, in the United Kingdom, about 4000 cinemas of all grades. The British Government last year helped 63,000 people to settle overseas. There are 1200 new trains in the London Midland and Scottish summer time-table. A meat van delivered £25,000 worth of gold and silver at the Bank of "Engl and recently. An official report in Britain states that five hundred kinds of material are used for men’s shoes. The London ambulance service has received over 40,000 calls at its 13 stations in the last year. Two thousands young pheasants were drowned in a flooded field near Keswick, England, recently. The average daily consumption of milk in England and Wales is less than one-third of a pint per person.

The names of three cottages side ,by side at Glyndebourne, Sussex, are “Anywhere,” “Nowhere,” and “Somewhere.” About 7000 musicians are employed professionally every day in the performance of music in London.

About 20 per cent, of the native passengers using the railway trains in India are said to evade paying their fares.

A young man climbed up a 30ft, wall at Grimsby Corn Exchange and released a pigeon caught by its leg in the gutterpipe.

For some years the annual cost of running the village of Sxogumber, in West Somerset, has been, between 1/2 and 2/6. Great Britain produces, approximately, 117,000,000 pairs of boots and shoes every year. It exports §- bout 12,000,000 pairs a year. Motorists a few years ago thought their tyres did well with a mileage of 5000. Now mileage of 10,000 and over are common. If the ocean were dried up the quantity of salt remaining would he enough to cover 5,000,000 square miles ‘with a layer one mile thick. A rabbit became lodged in the main water supply pipe at Cottingley, in Yorkshire, causing the village to be without water for a whole day. One of'the oldest maps known, a chart showing the world in the Babylonian age and about 2700 years old, recently has been exhibited in London.