Fire-Brigades

The London F.-B. has about 700 firemen, with about 50 land and 10 river steam Fixed engines, 70 hand engines, # 220 escapes, and 35 miles of hose. There arc about 60 stations, 130 watch FLAGS boxes, and 550 alarm points. Ancl yet, measured by numbers, the London Brigade is much inferior to several others. Paris has about 1700 men, with 240 engines; St. Petersburg has 1150 men; Berlin, 1100; New York, 1000; Chicago, 900; and Hamburg, 800. The latter supplies 305 firemen for every 100,000 inhabitants, wfiile I^opdon supplies 13. The New York Brigade is the most expensive, costing about £340,000 a year, and even in Boston, U.S.A., the average cost per head of population is 6s. 7d., while in London it is only 5d. nut while the N.Y. Brigade has to use 52,000,000; gallons of water a year, the London Brigade uses only 17,000,000. were first used in Nuremberg about 1657; but steam F.-E. were not used in London till 1829. in Theatres. Between 1750 and 1890 there have been about 750 fires in theatres, with about 6500 victims. The worst were at Capo d’Istria in 1794 (1000 victims), St. Petersburg in 1836 (800 victims), Canton in 1845 (1670 victims), Brooklyn in 1876 (283 victims), Tientsin in 1872 (600 victims), Vienna in 1885 (450 victims), in 1887 Paris (160 victims) and Exeter (188 victims), and Oporto in 1888 (119 victims). OF London broke out near London Bridge on September 2nd, 1666, and raged for four days, destroying fortunately two-thirds of the plague-defiled city, including 89 churches. The estimated lo was about £11,000,000, which is nothing compared with the lo es in the much smaller fires of recent times. The fire at Moscow in 1812 destroyed in five days property valued at £30,000,000 the Hamburg fire of 1842 cost £35,000,000; that; of Paris in 1871 cost £32,400,000; that of Chicago in the same year cost £38,000,000; and that of Boston in 1872 cost £15,750,000. First Gentleman of Europe” was the phrase used of George IV. The most valuable food fishes are the cod, the herring, and the salmon. The cod visit, for instance, the submarine bank on which the Lofoten Islands stand, and which is rich in the kinds of seaweed amongst which they find their food and lay their eggs and the herring are found, for instance, in the deep; channel which cuts off the Stavanger and Hard anger banks from the floor of the North Sea. And these two places illustrate centre—they the three great qualifications for a good fishing are very prolific, they are near the fishermen’s homes, and they are near large markets. The whole fishing industry, besides being immensely valuable from the food point of view, is very important in the light of defence and labour. The Atlantic coast of Canada has 50,000 men employed in the cod fishery alone, who would be a splendid marine reserve in times of national danger. There are three great fishing centres in the World. One is the North Sea, from which fish to the value of 4^ million pounds comes into Great Britain alone and the other two are the north-west corner of the; North Atlantic, and the north-east corner of the North Pacific. The ‘most important banks in the Atlantic are those of Newfoundland, which are caused by the melting of icebergs by the Gulf Stream and the consequent precipitation of the soil that all icebergs carry with them. The most important part of the Pacific fishery is in the Yellow Sea, for the Chinese and Japanese eat enormous quantities of all sorts of fish, including stranded whale. It is said that 40,000,000 Chinamen make their living by fishing. The distribution of fish has been revolutionized by quick steam transport by land and by sea, and the heavy drain on the fisheries has been met by the artificial propagation ofcfish, the U.S.A. spending as much as £70,000 a year in hatching about 400 million eggs. is a corruption of filiits, so that Fitz-williayn is simply William's-son. mile ACT, forbidding ‘obstreperous’ nonconformist clergy to come within five miles of a town, was pa ed in 1665 in the Clarendon Code. Stars are so far distant that they seem to remain in exactly the same relative position. are of very ancient origin, and usually bear some characteristic device. Rome’s was an eagle, China's is a * dragon,’ Turkey's a crescent, etc. The National Banner of England is the St. George’s Cro , of Scotland the St. Andrew’s, of Ireland the St. Patrick’s and the Union Jack is the union of tho three, and dates; from 1801 All coast-guard stations and H.M. ships hoist the White Ensign at the peak