GENERAL NEWS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 8060, 15 March 1906, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS

One of the principal causer, o! the pros- \ pwily <rf the Staffordshire pottery manufac- | turc \tm the discovery of a cheap, durable glate. tfhia was entirely due to the blunder of * «ervant girl employed at Stanley Farm, near Uurslem. She was engaged one day in heating a solution of common salt,4io be Übfcd in cuviug pork, and during her temporary absence the liquid boilod over. The result was that the strong brine, acting on the :ilmost red-hot surface of the unglazcd cooking vessel, produced a vitreous coating of enamel, which gave rise to the glazed pott-cry industry and provided a living for thousands. « ♦ * » A physician in charge of a well-known asylum for the care o! the insane recently said : M There is one infallible test either for the approach or the presence of lunacy. If the person whose case is being examined is Been to make no use of his thumb—if he lets it stand out at right angles from the hand, and employs it neither in salutation, writing, nor any other manual exercise—you may set it down for a fact that that person's mental balance is He or she may converse intelligibly, may in every respect be guarding tho secret of a mind diseased with the utmost care and cunning, but the tell-tale thumb will infallibly betray the lurking madness concealed."

Someone once said that the man who ncwr made a mistake never made anything, and this is certainly very true of many commercial enterprises which were largely due to trivial blunders on the part of their founders. Take the great industry of making plush. It camo about in this way. A man was looking for a wool warehouse in a certain street in London. He had forgotten the number, and went by mistake into a silk warehouse instead. There he saw a pile of rubbish, which, on his inquiring, he was told \tfas waste silk. He offered to buy it at a nominal price, and from the heap of rubbish tho Buyer—who afterwards was famed as Sir S. Cunliffe-Lister, the great mill-owner—suc-ceeded in making the fabric called plush, and at tho same time a great fortune. Par away in the North Atlantic lies the land of Iceland, inhabited by a sturdy raco of Norsemen, in all about 70,000. This is one of tho best educated countries of tho world. The people hold family worship daily, and are devout worshippers in tho house of God. There is not a person of legal age who cannot read and write ; tho plainest workman knows history, law, religion, and especially his Bible. Women have the same political rights enjoyed by men. All the children arc baptised and carefully trained, and virtue reigns supremo. All are children of God. A writer says : " In a thousand years but two eases ot theft have been found in Iceland. No prison nor police are there; neither are there holts or bars on the house doors of the inhabitants." • ' ' '

Why is a soldier called Tommy Atkins ? Not many people can answer this question, although the reason is a very simple one. Fears ngo very few of our soldiers could write, so the War Oliice made arrangements whereby every soldier could put his mark on an official paper, instead oi having lo sign his name. On the documents a man had to sign when enlisting a space was left for the colonel to write the man's name, and a second space for the man to put his mark. As an instance of how the document was to be jilfed up, the following was .printed : " Nauio (Thomas Atkins)," in the same way as " N. or M." appear; in tho Catechism, implying that the man's name was lo be inserted in full. For more than a hundred years this appeared on every enlistment paper, and so the soldier came to be known as " Tommy Atkins." f

Everybody may not know that the United States once began to build a fort on British soil. This is now Fort Montgomery, near the foot of Lake Champlain, just north-east of Rouse's Point, New York. After the war of 1812 it was thought advisable to guard tho entrance to the lake, and it was planned to build what was then considered a great fort, carrying three tiers of guns. After the work was well under way it was discovered that, owing to an error of early surveyors, the forty-fifth parallel, then the actual boundary between Canada and New York, passed just south of the fort. Work, of course, was suspended; until in 1842 the territory was restored to the United States. The fort was dubbed " Fort Blunder," and though it was finished after the boundary question was settled by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, it has never been manned by more than enough to keep it in order, and never armed. At present a sergeant of marines is stationed there, whose only duty is to raise and lower the flag.

In the course o! a recent lecture at the Conference of Musicians in Dublin, Ireland, some interesting particulars and some astonishing statistics were given relatively to the amount of work accomplished by the brain and nerves in piano playing. A pianist, in view of the present state of pianoforte playing, has to cultivate the eye to see about 1500 signs in one minute, the fingers to make abtui 2000 movements, and the brain to receive and understand separately the 1500 signs while it issues 2000 orders. In playing Weber's " MoU perpetuo," a pianist has to read 4541 notes in a little under four minutes. This U about nineteen per second ; but the eye can receive only about ten consecutive impressions per second, so that it is evident that in very rapid music a player does not see every note singly, but in groups—probably a bar or mote at one vision. In Chopin's "Etude in B Minor " (in the second set) the speed of reading is still greater, since it is necessary to read 3950 signs in two miuutes and a hail, which is equivalent to about tweuty-six notafl ger second.