“Bolivia is producing about one-third of the world's output of tin.”
“Records disclose that for several centuries an infusion of nutgalls treated with sulphate of iron composed the only known ink.”
“The first job held by William G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, was that of a newsboy selling the Macon Morning Telegraph. His next job was that of a farm laborer.”
“There are 2,500,000 freight-cars in the country, and their average life is somewhere about twenty years.”
“Since gold was discovered in the Auckland province, in 1852, there has been exported from that district gold to the value of $116,796,000.”
I should, to be sure, be more completely educated if I could find somewhere, under the sporting news, or at the base of the obituaries, a statement of where Auckland is. But perhaps that information will come to-morrow.
Well, I have presented here only a tithe of the knowledge I have to-day gleaned from the daily press, that hitherto (by me, at least) underestimated institution. I haven't stated that I now know who first used anthracite coal as a fuel, and when. You don't know that, I am sure. Neither do you know how many acres of corn were planted in England and Wales in 1915 and 1916, nor how many government employees there were in France before the war, nor that “A bundle of fine glass threads forms a new ink-eraser.”
However, I must share with you my choicest acquisition. It seems little less than a crime to keep such knowledge from the world at large, to bury it at the bottom of a column on the ninth page of the first edition of the Springfield Republican. So I rewrite it here. For oral delivery, I shall save it till some caller comes whom I particularly desire to impress. Then, with all the Old-World courtesy of Mr. Ezra Barkley, I shall offer this guest a chair, and as I do so I shall remark, with the careless casualness of the truly erudite: “Guatemala has only one furniture factory. It employs a hundred and fifty men.”
