GENERAL NEWS.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 176, 11 March 1902, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS.

Bengal has 48,044 widows who IW under ten years of age. It is estimated that one-third of the. dwellers upon the earth aig habitual users of tobacco. W There are 556,000 gramsTiu a busheli of wheat; 16,400,000 in a bushel of clover. Hindo chronology extends te 6174 b.c. ; Babylon, 6158 b.o. ; and China, 6157 b c. Five and a half ounces of grapes are required to make a single wine-glassful of port. Forests cover one-Jienth # the land of the earth, and one-qfuarter land surface. . Russian petroleum wells are generallyabout nine hundred feet in depth; those in America five hundred feet. The children of the poor in Japan are nearly always labelled in case they should array from their homes whilst their mothers ate engaged in domestic ‘duties. Lake Copals, in Bceotia, famous in antiquity for its has now been completely drained and turned into forty-eight thousand acres of arable land. It is asserted that baked potatoes are more nutritious than those cooked in any other way, and that fried ones are the most difficult to digest. In some parts of Holland a birth is announced by fastening a silk pin'cushion on the door-knob. If the pin-cushion Is red, the baby is a boy; and if white, a girl. A smoking tree has been found in the village of Ono, Japan. It smokes only in the evening, just after sunset, and the smoke issues from the top of the trunk, 'The tree is sixty feet high. Tom (who is accustomed to put op with his elder brother’s old clothes and caat-ofi toys): * Mother !’ * Mother : ‘ Well, Tom f’ Tom (thoughtfully): 1 Mother, if Bob .gets married, and dice, shall I have to taka 'his widow P