GENERAL NEWS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 3683, 19 November 1912, Page 2

GENERAL NEWS.

A circular issued 1 by numerous wine growers of Franco recommends the use of wine baths. ■ “A twenty-five gallon cask of superior Malvoisie,” it reads, ‘‘is sufficient for 100 baths. The whole contents of the barrel are emptied into the bath each time, and after remaining in it 20 minutes, the wine is poured back. After the hundredth bath tho Malvoisie is distilled, and delicious Fan de Vie’ is obtained.” The total abstinence movement is believed to be spreading in France. Statistics can be very cynical things. At all events, tho marriage, or rather remarriage, statistics in the mairies of Paris make sad reading for tho sentimentalists. Of 2270 disconsolate widowers 148 remarry within a year. The defections increase with terrible rapidity in the second year, which sees | 628 relapses from the ranks of mourn-ei-s. At the end of the third year onlv 37 widowers remain. With the widows it is even worse. Xono marry J within the first year of their husband’s decease, but it is to be feared that this fact is due not to fidelity, hut to tho strict legal veto which obtains in France. Once the law’s delay is at an end' they go off with vertiginous rapidity. Of 1907 weeping widows, ’ in eighteen months only four had not exchanged the weeds for a wedding garment.

A new craze has been provided in Paris for very smart people. The idea is that, instead of using morphia, cocaine, or eafeine, they should employ as a stimulant hypodermic injectionsof otto of roses, violet, and cherry blossom perfumes. These fragrances remain. An actress, who was the first to use it, declared that fortyeight hours after an injection of one of these perfumes her skin was saturated with the aroma. The experiment is proving attractive. With enormous profits ns an incentive, Colonel F. W. Brown and George S. Ziller, of Berkeley Springs, Virginia, have formed a stock company to engage in “rattlesnake culture.” According to Colonel Brown, the demand for rattlesnake skins is’ greater than the supply. When tanned the skin of the rattler makes a superior grade of leather for purses, belts, women's footwear, and toilet‘’accessories. An immense tract in the mountains where tho snakes thrive has been bought by Colonel Brown. Tuberculosis caused So,oBB deaths in France in 1910, or 217 per 100,000 inhabitants, as against about 100 m Germany, Italy, Spain and the low countries, 146 in England and 139 in Belgium. Out of i.OO Frenchmen dying between twenty and thirty-nine years, more than forty-two died from tuberculosis. A correspondence exists between those departments with a high tuberculosis death rate and those with a large consumption of alcohol.