Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1890 — A PRIMITIVE AFRICAN CANNON. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

A PRIMITIVE AFRICAN CANNON.

Ordnance Used by the Warrior* of the Dark Continent, Among the trophies of Germany’s past triumphs that grace the grounds which surround the Marine Academy Building at Kiel none is of more interest than v a cannon made by natives of Africa and captured from them in a battle near Pangani. It has not the

slightest contrivance for aiming and its caliber is very small. The carriage is made of wood. The wheels are cut out of one piece, approximately round, and are fastened to the wooden axles with long rusty nails. The piece of ordnance apparently would prove more dangerous to its owners than* to the enemy. Among unscientific “medicine men* there is a practice and a form of prescription known as the “shotgun,” and it consists of prescriptions containing twenty or thirty different ingredients, the idea being that some one of them will hit the mark blindly aimed at. The largest number of ingredients in any one Pullman prescription of which we haveMearned is twenty-three. The motto of the writer of such a prescription must have been “to hit it if it was a deer and miss it if it was a calf.” Of course,’it is useless to tell an intelligent person that no one but a moss-covered, brass-buttressed, copperlined, zinc-bottomed gorilla could submit to such treatment with any hope of recovering. But there are those whose vigor and vitality enable them to rally, notwithstanding their doctors. —Pullman (EL) Journal. Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. Woe to him who is induced to grasp at anything before him or behind him.— Anon. A vessel jaay lose its grip, and, strange to say, retain its hold.

AN AFRICAN PIECE OF ORDNANCE.