Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1882 — BITS OF INFORMATION. [ARTICLE]

BITS OF INFORMATION.

The largest school in the world is In Egypt As XiATE as the time of James L the disposal of the hand of a young orphan heiress lay with the King. The salary of the President of the Republic of France is fixed at 600,000 franca, with an additional allowance of 300,000 francs for household expenses. The first base-ball dab was the Knickerbocker, of New York, that is, the first one to sustain a permanent existence in the United States. It was started in the year of 1845, and has continued its existence, we believe, ever since. The same, however, did not become the national one until many years afterward. The first meteoric shower which attracted attention in modern times was that witnessed by the Moravian missonanes, in Greenlaud, in 1790. This phenomenon was observed over a wide extent of territory. Humboldt, then traveling in South America, said : “ Toward tue morning of Nov. 13, a most extraordinary scene of shooting stars was seen. Thousands of bodies and falling stars succeeded each other daring four hoars. Their direction was very regular, from north to south; from the beginning of the shower there was not a space in the firmament eqnal in extent to three diameters of the moon which was not filled every instant with bodies of falling stars. All the meteors left luminous traces or phosphorescent bands behind tbem, wliicn lasted seven or eight seconds.

The origin of the expression “ Go to Halifax ”is as follows : The evil repute of Halifax implied in this old usage came to it by inheritance from Halifax, in Yorkshire, England, and is not a thing to be ashamed of. Halifax law, as may be gathered from a letter of Lord Leicester’s, quoted by Motley in his “ History of the United Netherlands,” was that criminals should be “condemned first and inquired upon alter,” in which it resembled “ Jedburg justice.” Halifax lay within the forest of Hardwick, the customary law of which was that if a felon were taken with 13i pence worth of goods, stolen within iJiut liberty, he should be tried by four frith burghers from four of the precinct towns, and, if condemned by them, hanged the next market day. An ter which the caie might be sent to a jury I Halifax also had the credit of inventing the rude guillotine of Manuaye, which the liegent, Earl of Morton, introduced iuto Scotland, only to hive his own head chopped off with it. Naturally, Halifax was a place of terror to rogues.

To Dr. Edward Jenner is due the credit of discovering and introducing vaccination into general practice, fie was seven years in the serwtee of a surgeon at Sudbury, near Bristol, England, or from the time he was 14 till he was 21 years old, and while there his attention was directed to the subject of a preventive of small-pox. While in his master’s surgery one day he heard a young countrywoman say that she could not tuke small-pox because she had already had the cow-pox, a mild disorder of the eruptive kmd appearing on the udder of the animal, and communicated in a similar form to their hands ; that it had never been known to prove fatal when thus communicated; and that the belief was common among the agricultural classes that whoever had taken the disease was secure against the infection of small-pox. He continued to investigate the cause, and so confident was he, finally, that several experiments were made upon his son, a boy under 6 years of age. It was not, however, until over twenty-five years of observations and experiment that his views were adopted, and then the sentiment was as much in favor of Iris plan as it had been against it before.