INTERESTING ITEMS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 81828, 22 August 1906, Page 4

INTERESTING ITEMS.

' 0m ol the principal causes o! the prosperil* of the Staffordshire pottery manufacture mi the discovery of a cheap, durable {law. Thia was entirely due to the blunder el a servant girl employed at Stanley Farm, near Borslem. She was engaged one day in heating a solution of common salt.Oio be nasi in coring pork, and during her temporary abgence fte liqnid boiled over. The remit was that the strong brine, acting on the almost red-hot surface of the unglazed cooking Tessel, produced a vitreous coating of enamel, which gave rise to the glazed pottery industry and provided, a living for thousands. • • • •

A physician Id charge of a well-known asyiam for the care of the insane recently said: " There is one infallible test either for she approach or the presence of lunacy. If the person whose case is being examined is asen 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 gone. He or she may converse iaMngibly, may in every respect be guarding the 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 never made a migtata never made anything, and tkis is certainly very true of many commercial enterprises which were largely due to trivial blunders on the part of their founders. Take the gnat industry of making plush. It cams about in this way. A man was looking for a wool warehouse in a certain street is 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 was waste silk. He offered to bny it at a nominal price, and from the heap, of rubbish the buyer—who afterwards was famed as Sir S. Cunliffe-Lister, the great mill-owner—suc-ceeded is making the fabric called plush, and at the same time a great fortune. Far away in the North Atlantic lies the land of Iceland, inhabited by a sturdy race of Norsemen, in all about 70,000: This ia one of the best educated countries of the world. The people hold family worship daily, and are devout worshippers in the house of God. There is sot a person of legal age who cannot read and write ; the plainest workman knows history, law, religion, and especially his Bible. Women have the same political rights enjoyed by men. AU the children are baptised and carefully trained, and virtue reigns supreme. All are children of God. A writer says : " In a thousand years but two cases of theft have been found in Iceland. No prison not police are there ; neither are there boits 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. Years ago very few of our soldiers could write, so the War Office made arrangements whereby every soldier could put his mark on an official paper, instead of having to 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 rilled up, the following was printed 1 " Name (Thomas Atkins)," in the same way as " N. or M." appears in the Catechism, implying that the man's name was to 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." t 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 House's Point, New York. After the war it 1812 it was thought advisable to guard the 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 of a recent lectare at the Conference of Musicians in Dublin, Ireland, ■ome interesting particulars and some as* toniabing 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 1300 signs in one minute, the fingers to make about 2000 movements, and the brain to receive and understand separately the 1500 signs while it issues 2000 orders. In playing Weber's " Moto perpetuo," i pianist baa to read 4541 notes in a little under four minutes. This iJ 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 more at one vision. In Chopin's " Etude in E Minor " (in the second set) the speed of leading is still greater, since it is necessary to read 3950 signs in two minutes ar.J a half, which is equivalent to about twenty-six notes second.