BREVITIES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 69, 17 April 1909, Page 3

BREVITIES.

Tin' Romans liild trade unions. The I'opc's annual income is £490,000. ■. A ])ouml of wool makes a yard of cloth. ' In Alaska sonic gross grows to the height of six feet, There are 1)000 different kinds of fish in the Nile. 1 Hospitals in England spend £1,250,000 .yearly. Camels can carry a loud three times as heavy as can dorses. I (/cmon-trecs in .Sicily bear as many as UO.OOO lemons a year. There are forty publications in the iworlil devoted to Esperanto. During the winter of 1348 the wholu of the Italian rivers were frozen over. A man's hair, as a general rule, turns grey five years cnrlicr than a woman's. Departing guests at a Japanese hotel always receive a gift—visually a towel. Babylon was probably the first city in Uiu world with a population of on, ] million, A Turkish wife can only dispose of one-third of her property without her husband's consent. An acre of good fishing will yield more fo'Od in a week than an acre of the best land in a year. Since 1883 tie.' sen W washed awav 410 acres of the British Isles, but it has also added 30,752. The land gained, however, is at present useless. In Tasmania no person under thirteen years of age is allowed to smoke in a public place. In Japan the coal output in eleven yoars has increased from 200.000 tons to 11,500,000 tons annually. The beggar chief of Sooehow, who is king of the Chinese bvggnrs. lias an inooine estimated at .£3OllO annually. When the body of a starving animal, including man, loses two-fil'ths of its substance, the. Inevitable result is death. The llesh of the small shark, commonly known as dogfish, is said to be extremely palatable, and more nutritious than beef. New Zealand lias an available coal supply of 1,200.000.000 tons, of wliiclt not more than 20,000,000 tons has teen touched. In a Canadian horse race recently third place was Avon by a jockey 103 years old. He 'has ridden in more than . six thousand races. On the west const of- India are found i Oystev-slieHs six inches in diameter, and , so, transparent that they can be used as ! window-glass, i As shown by tlw cnis'iv. « (lawli <if ■ lightning Is made up of innumerable I small flashes, each one following the other by an almost imperceptible period ) of time, King Alfonso of Spain is the only ; monarch who does not sign his name to i documents and edicts. His 'signature -is simply '"Yo, el Hey"—"l, the King." In the English language these arc, ap--1 proximately, 100,000 words, 00,000 being i' of Teutonic origin, 30,000 from Greek and Latin, and 10,000 from other sources,

Xowspapcrs left by travellers in railway cars In Belgium arc collected—about 200,0001b a year—and used in the i manufacture of pulp for making a cor- ' tain quality of cardboard. In Europe, at the time of the French .Revolution, there wore only 21 cities of i over 100,000 inhabitants. Now there arc ■ 100 such, anil 55 of them have over ■ 250,000 inhabitants. ■ , There are no convents in "Norway. I Seven thousand British subjects arc ' born at sea every year. i Mr. Tnft is the twenty-sixth President > of the United States. •A man's hand is. o-.i an averag.% l%m ? longer than that of a woman. Japnncsc dead are buried in a squat- ' ting position, chin upon knees. Oil was used for burning in lamps as ' early as the epoch of 'Abraham, about ,1821 B.C.