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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume X, Issue 92, 17 April 1875, Page 4

The Taranaki Budget says that a contract for the delivery of 60,000 bushels of charcoal has been entered into by John Blake with the Iron-sand Company. We notice from our American files that the hairless horse is wandering about the United States, and seems to be gleaning a golden harvest for his proprietors. As an illustration of the failure of the education tay, the Auckland Star mentions a large industrial settlement in a remote district of the province where no collector has appeared, because the residents, not having sufficient children for a echool, have declared they will not pay the tax, but will duck in a large pond any man asking them. Tbe Border Post relates a strange case of somnambulism, A boy living at Albury walked two miles, though in a profound sleep tbe whole of tbe time, during which ho divested himself of clothing, nnd walked home in his shirt, opened the gate, passed through the garden, entered the house, closed tl c door, and went to bed. A lady contractor, a Mrs Fitzgerald, says the Railway News, who is Baid to be a woman of much executive ability and enterprise, recently completed a contract for grading nineteen miles of the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio road iv Texas, and has secured another contract on the same road. J. he owns sixty mules and a full outfit of s. tapers, ploughs, &c, and works a large force of men. One vine-grower in Auckland expects to make fifteen hundred gallons of wino this year, and others in the same diatrict have been successful. Flour will extinguish the flames of burning kerosene promptly. It rapidly absorbs the fluid, deadens the flame, and can be readily gathered up and thrown out of doors. The profits of the leading London Joint Stock Banks are enormous. The London and Westminster Rank at the next general meeting will declare a dividend of 11 per cent, for the balf year, making for the year 21 per cent, on paid up capital of £2,000,000. Last year the dividend was 22 per cent. The Union Bank for Inst year will pay 15 per cent, and the London Joint Stock 22 J per cent. A clergyman at a recent teachers' meeting in Ohio, said that teachers are too often selected in the wrong way. "Examiners make an intellectual requirement in straight-jacket style, and pay no attention whatever to the peculiar, natural, and innate adaptedness of the teacher for the profession, and thus men and women are found at the head of our schools who are no more able to develop the human mind than a Modoc is to draw a picture of the heavenly Jerusalem with charcoal." Tbe " Loafer in the Street" writes in the Christchurch Press : — When a party of the name of— let us say — Johnson, gets fined five shillings for a drunk and disorderly, all the Johnsons 'of that ilk aud other ilks at once inform your readers that they are not the drunk and disorderly Johnson spoken of. These letters are teeming with interest to a public which does not care whether one Johnson, or 500 Johnsons were drunk or not ; but there is, so to speak, a more entrancing form of coming before the public still. It is as thus — "On January Ist, the wife of Marmozet Morepork of a son. Home papers please copy." It will be apparent that immediately on the arrival of the New Zealand mail, the London Times and all the first-class European papers announce the fact to their readers tbat Morepork bas got a son. Stocks rise or fall, Bismarck frowns, the Left Centre in Paris shout for each other, Rothschild guarantees a fresh New Zealand loan. Oh Morepork, why can't you be satisfied with the silent condolence of your colonial jfriondß without expecting the Old World to get on the bust because Mrs M. has presented you with a seventh perpetuation of ycur own ugliness. Home papers pleaso copy, indeed. It's the apotheosis of rotment, Morepork. Flies. — It is consolatory to find that fiies are of some use, but for all that we cannot bring ourselves to be fond of them. A contemporary soys :—" In a publication entitled the Chemist and Druggist, a Mr Emerson, a chemist of West Hartlepool, has an interesting paper on flies, their uses, and wb might alao add, their abuse.. Mr Emerson has instituted a series of microscopical examinations, and his investigations have convinced him that fiies |are most

useful and indefatigable aerial scavengers, without whese unwearying services the health of mankind would suffer to a rnatei.%l extent The microscope revealed to the astonished eye of the experimentalist the singular fact tbat the legs of flies in performing tbeir aerial revolutions collected countless myriads of animalcules, in tbe scraping together of which for food the flies go through those peculiar movements of rubbing their legs one against the other, and afterwards applying their trunks, wherewith to carry the choice morsels for digestion; Whereever tbe air is most impure, these animalcules exist in the greatest numbers, and tbere the flies busily congregate also, and busily improve each shining hour. The burning of sulphur was discovered to be the best meanß of reducing the number of these animalcules, and consequently of the flies, whose annoying persecutions will be more patiently borne with, when, it is known how incalculably useful they ore in their particular sphere. Mr Emerson purposes shortly proceeding with a similar series of experiments concerning the utility of the spider.