NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3855, 9 October 1928, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Edison began his career as a newsboy on a railway. About 1100 kinds of insects make their homes in oak trees. The act of speaking’ calls into operation forty-four different muscles. The base of the largest Egyptian pyramid covei’S an area of 13 acres. There are 322 varieties of wheat which have a botanical difference from each other. In 100 years the Aldeburg and Filey lifeboats have saved 650 lives. An old man in St. Pancras workhouse, London, is teaching himself Greek. For the first time sinee it was built in 1891 the Isle of Man gaol at Douglas was empty a few weeks ago. Of 93 motor-cycles in Barbadoes, British West Indies, last October, 73 were of British manufacture. Marriage was the name of a couple who lately sought a separation order at N'orth London Police Court. Bones of at least 2000 hippopotami killed by prehistoric hunters have been found in a single cave in Sicily. Two French engineers have invented an aerial torpedo for transporting letters and packagtes at a. speed of nearly 300 m.p.h. ‘The Huzuls of the Carpathians milk their cows through a wedding ring to prevent witches from stealing the milk. Oil a ship being built in Belfast, everything, from handling luggage to cleaning and cooking, will be clone by electricity. Sumatra, in the East Indian Archipelago, has the greatest variety of" animal and vegetable life of any place in the world. The saloon motor car is now so popular that 82 per cent, of the ears manufactured in the United States in 1927 were of the closed type. A rainbow may sometimes be seen all day long in Siberia. It is due to reflection of the sun on fine particles of snbw in the air. There is in Peru a quicksilver mine 170 fathoms in circumference and 480 ft. deep. In this abyss are streets, squares, and a church. An old factory beam engine, made in 1814, has been working continuously since 1827 at silk mills in Taunton, and is still in excellent order.

Wfillesden school teachers have been complaining of children being unfitted for lessons by visiting greyhound tracks.

Jewish girls marry early, on the average, the vast majority getting married before they are twenty-five years of age. Orchids valued at more than £IOOO decorated the dinner table of Mr. H. J. Solomon/a botanist, on his wife’s birthday.

During quarry on a building estate at Preston, near Weymouth, between 4000 and 5000 bronze coins were found in a heap. In Central Anatolia several villages containing as many as 300 houses have been deserted owing to drought and lack of irrigation. In 1909 there were 373 fatal accidents due to motor vehicles in Great Britain compared with 4480 in 1927, when 4606 were killed. A Roman sacrificial altar and a dungeon with Avails four feet thick have been revealed by excavations at Caelleon, Monmouthshire. For the British Searchlight Tattoo, in which 600 ex-sendee men figured recently, a marquee 900 ft. long and 160 ft. Avide-Avas constructed. In 1927 the income of the Crystal Palace Avas £278 in excess of expenditure, against losses of £2924 and £13,679 in the two preceding years. More thou 500,000 people flow in British aircraft during 1927. Only five lives Averc lost in accidents to civil machines, including testing and racing. Professor Henry J. Spooner, has calculated that a million pounds a week is lqst in Britain orving to the reduced efficiency of Avorkers caused by noise. An interesting industry in iMexico is gathering cochineal insects, which are carefully brushed into bags from the cactus branches on which they live. As he was watching trvo women fighting, Sidney Townend, aged 78, a Hull pensioner, Avas pushed a- , gainst a Avail by the crowd and died from his injuries.

At the present rate, the system of marking motor-ears now in use in Britain will he completely exhausted in two years’ time. New systems are being discussed. There were 5000 fishes from all parts of the world, including the famous tree-climbing fish of tropical Africa, at the British Aquarists Exhibition in London recently. Five hundred acres of mooi’land between Hebden Bridge and penholme caught fire during the recent heat-wave, destroying all grazing prospects for three years to come. Nearly all the stone removed from the Houses of Parliament that was offered as a souvenir of Westminster to members of the house for garden roekwork has now been allotted. 'Franz Corner, an officer in the German Mercantile Marine, left Lisbon on March B, bound for the other side of the Atlantic. He arrived at the Virgin Islands, in tho British West Indies, on July 31. For two and a-half centuries a Hyde Park tree has weathered all the storms which blew past it, but a sudden gust, a few weeks ago, proved too much for it, a,nd it snapped about 10ft. above earth. Eleven brothers named Herbert

acted as stewards at a Worthing charity fete. Dr. Clapham, of Wimbledon, who has just died, rode a bicycle till he was 87. The cost of restoring penny postage in Britain is now estimated at ever £5,000,000 a year. Goldfish are descended from the common carp, and originated in China and Japan. Motorists in Surrey paid £15,656 in fines during the financial year ended March 31 last. A lighted cigarette-end has destroyed four acres of trees in Alice Holt Forest in Hampshire. Madrid has increased its population from 746,000 to nearly 1,000,000 in the last five years. German youths are not so tall now as in pre-war days, the general decrease being at least ljin. Sutton Coldfield has been celebrating its story of 2000 years by a pageant in which 1200 people took part. Swimming for over an hour a dog has crossed the Mersey at a point where it is a mile and a-half wide. A leper arrived at Fiji by the Tofua recently from New Zealand, to be transferred to Makogai. Arrangements were made for him to travel by the Tofua by the New Zealand Government, special precautionary arrangements being taken so that he came in contact with no one on the ship. Referring to the matter, the chief medical officer of Fiji, Dr. Montague, stated that there was little danger of infection from a leper —much less, indeed, than from an ordinary consumptive, The Eastern people took no notice of it unless it was a particularly serious case. The New Zealander was taken from Suva to Makogai by the leper barge, in company with seven lepers from Fiji.