News Items

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4380, 2 March 1909, Page 1

News Items

A Ton of oil has been obtained from the tongue of a:single whale. The Duchy of Lancaster the King an annual revenue of :• £60,000. City air, scientists declare, contains 14 times as many miorobes as country air. There are, by latest statistics, ! 3520 miles of inland navagatiott | in England and Wales. The world has now 3320 | lighthouses. Of these the { United States owns 635, and f Britain has 559.. The retail price of musk to day is about £lO an ounce, or two and a half times its weight in i gold. In China a father cannot leave more property to one son than to another; all must have an equal share. A. prisoner in Greece who i 8 sentenced to death has to wait two years before the sentence is carried out. i An oak-tree, three years old, averages 2ft. lOJiu. in height; an elm will grow in three years Bft. 3in. . ’ Submarine divers find great difficulty in reaching a depth of over 130 ft. 200 ft. has never yet been achieved, j At 1000 fathoms below the surface of the ocean there is a uniform temperature just above | freeezing point., | It hRS been calculated that the customer at the ordinary re-, fresh ment bar pays for his tea at a rate of 18s. a pound. It takes 2800 silkworms to make a pound of silk, and these worms eat 156 pounds of leaves before they spin their cocoons. The North Riding of Yorkshire contains 200,051 acres of moorland and mountain —a record for any co un t r y in the J United Kingdom* Germany now holds the . world;s record for glovemaking. I She has 1100 glove factories, of , which 1000 make kid gloves ex*— olusively. The wreck record of the if Baltic Sea is greater than that of any other part of the world. The average is one a day throughout the year. 1 Asparagus is so plentiful on the Russian steppes that the cattle eat it like grass. The seeds are sometimes dried and used as a substitute for coffee. ■) The lantern of the Lundy 4 Island lighthouse is 540 ft above high water, and can be seen 31 f miles away. The Cape Clear | light is 455 ft above the sea. ;f: It is a wondeifn' ! ' g that | oysters, after tli • beeu brought away l) sea, know by instinct th when the tide is rising > 1 Mach- . ing their b»u> i their own accord op, i :ii u » ells to | receive their food from the sea, | as if they were still at home. The average time takeh for each finger-nail to grow its full length is about four and a-half months, and at this rate a man of 70 years would have renewed his nails 187 1 times. Taking the length of each nail at half an inch, he would have grown 7ft 9in of nail on each finger, and on all his fingers and thumbs an aggregate length of 77ft 6in.