MISCELLANEOUS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1891, 14 May 1889, Page 4

MISCELLANEOUS.

An Auckland inventor has struck a good thing in fire kindlera. Ho has not only found a demand in New Zealand, but is meeting with ready sale for them in London, He shipped 10,000 in the lonic and Eimulaka. The latest addition to the family of Emperor William of Germany is reported to be very feeble and to have inherited a malformation of the left arm similar to that of his father, Madame Carnot of France has sot the example among the ladies of the Presidential Court of wearing lilies of the valley on all occasions, and these flowers are now regarded as the emblem of the Carnot regime. Over 75,000 monkeys were killed in Brazil last year and the pelts shipped to London to be made into furs. If the fashion continues the monkey race will be thinned out amazingly in the next two or three years. A lost colour has been discovered ! Artists and scientific men have long wondered about the beautiful “ azzurriuo ” found in the ruins of Pompeii. M. Fouque, the mineralogist, with a mixture of silicate of copper and of lime, has now obtained the brilliant crystalline “azure” of Pompeii. It is a tint perfectly unchangeable, and identical with the Alexandrian blue which was known to the Ptolemies, and imported into Italy in the first years of the Christian era. Lady M , a well-known figure in the streets of Melbourne, is the sister of a charming peeress, whoso portrait may he seen in most of the shop windows whore bishops and professional beauties gaze vacantly at one another all day long. Lady M—, herself the wreck of a once beautiful woman, receives a quarterly remittance of £SO from England. Immediately she gets the money she goes upon what the reporters of the Melbourne evening papers describe as “ a howling tear.” In other words, she becomes boisterously drunk, and makes a disgraceful exhibition of herself in the streets. The following novel calculations have (says the Pall Mall Gazette) been made by Mr John Cook, district see,votary of* the West Cumberland District Lodge of Good Templars, for the purpose of enabling the public to gain a better conception of the large amount expended each year in drink. Last year’s drink bill, as taken from Parliamentary returns, was £124,011,439. This amount would give £3 7a per head to the estimated population of the nation, and £l6 15s for each average family. Its weight in sovereigns would be 97G tons, while it would cover a space of 628 acres with sovereigns laid edge to edgo. If the coins were placed face to face they would reach 115 - miles, or make a golden cord reaching from Carlisle to Liverpool or Manchester. Placed edge to edge they would extend a distance of 1720 miles. To count these coins at one sovereign per second would take four years less a fortnight. For each letter in the Bible the amount last year expended in liquor is set down at £34 18s 9d.