News Items

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4392, 30 March 1909, Page 1

News Items

One front door in every 400 s left unlocked at night. Francis Joseph of Austria, pays his chief cook £2OOO a year.

The Queen of Denmark is the tallest Royal lady in Europe. The vineyards of the world yield 3,554,416,000 gallons of wine a year.

Some microbes can live over 200 years on land, and longer still in water. Some of the Thibetan lakes in the Himalayan Mountains are 20,000 ft above sea level. In Norway the average length of life is greater than in any other country on the globe. • In Japan the coal output in 11 years has increased from 20,000 tons to 11,500,000 tons annually.

Nearly everybody smokes in Japan. The girls begin when they are ten years of age, and the boys a year earlier.

The flesh of a small shark, commonly known as dogfish, is said to be exiremely palatable, and more nutritious than beef.

On the West Coast of India are found oyster shells 3ix inches in diameter, and so transparent that they can be used as window-glass.

British Guina has the-most' mixed population in the world, there being an admixture of French, Dutch, Spanish, British and Indian blood there, In the English language there are, approximately, 100,000 words 60,000 being of teutonic origin, 30,000 from Greek and Latin, and 10,000 from other sources. ;

Newspapers left by travellers in railway cars in Belgium are collected—about 260,0001 b. a year—and used in th-> manu« facture of pulp for making a certain quality of cardboard.

Greek and Roman doors invariably open outwards. A person passing out of the house is, therefore, obliged to knock on the door before opening it, to avoid a collision with a passerby.

Eagles have been known to fly to a height of 6000 ft A lark will rise to the same h°ight, and so will crows. As ;i rule, however, it is said, birds do not fly at a greater height, than 1000 ft.

Some idea of ib*■ O ’-ido force with which a bird pass*'* /h rough the air may bo ovum n the fact that a common tin v flew right through a piece, of plate glass a quarter of an inch thick.

Two persons playing dominoes ten hours a day. and making four moves a minute, could continue 118,000 years without exhausting all the combinations of the game, the total of which is 248,528,211,840.

The icebergs of the two hemispheres are entirely different in shape. The Actic bergs are irregular in form, with lofty pinnacles and glittering domes, while the Antartic ones are flat--topped and sohd locking.

The nettle is put to a useful purpose in some parts of Europe by being converted into various fabrics. In Dresden a thread from it has been produced so fine and silky that a length of sixty miles only weighs four ounces.