Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1890 — Tendency to Specialism. [ARTICLE]

Tendency to Specialism.

There are 797 daily and weekly German papers published in the United States and Canada. Domestic servants are so scarce in Montreal that women in want of help are said to visit the jail with a view to engaging young women to work for them at the close of their term of imprisonment. There is nothing pleasanter to use as a cure for rough or sunburnt skin than slices of raw cucumber. It is a much cheaper remedy than any of the preparations in bottles, and the best way is to cut off a slice and rub the juice well into the skin and then dry with a towel. A trial has been made at Civita Vecchia of a nautical ball invented by Signor Balsameljo. It is seven feet in diameter and can hold four persons. When closed it sinks, and is steered and propelled under water by rudder and screw. It has windows and grapplers, and, besides fishing up things, it may be used for destructive purposes in time of war. Salmon P. Chase's old law sign has been discovered, covered with dust and cobwebs, on a building formerly occu - pied by lawyers on Third street near Main, in Cincinnati. The name of Flamen Ball, for many years a prominent character in Cincinnati, appears on the sign as Chase’s law partner. It was in this building that the late Chief Justice and his distinguished partner had their law offices for several years. In a short time the Stin, the Times, the World and other New York dailies are to begin the use of typesettiu g machines. It is also announced that the printer of the Century Magazine is to have his typesetting done by machinery. A syndicate of book publishers has also made arrangements to put fifty or a hundred typesetting machines into a co-operative office, where all the body matter of cheap publications issued in New York will be turned out. A most peculiar case is reported from Edwardsville, 111. Mary A. Walsh, an orphan of 17, has been for some time suffering from severe pains in the head. An examination revealed the presence in the head of screw worms. These worms are developed from eggs deposited in the nose by the Texas fly. They average in size from one-half to three-quarters of an inch in length, and are one-quarter of an inch in diameter. Fifty-seven of the worms were removed.

The Empress of Germany has military tastes as well as her husband. At the late grand review on Templehoffield she was in the saddle for two hours, riding superbly, and leading her own regiment of cuirassiers past the Emperor. Her uniform as colonel was a habit of white cloth, embroidered on shoulders and collar with the red and silver colors of the regiment, and a three-cornered white felt hat with many ostrich feathers, in which she looked remarkably pretty. Stanley said on one occasion: I have always found tobacco a solace and an aid to concentration. I remember on one journey down the Congo we were just about to enter a most dangerous •country. I knew that a fight was inevitable, and I told my men to make ready. I took an observation, lighted my pipe, and smoked for five minutes to settle myself for action* We were fighting for our lives a few minutes afterward, and the battle went on for hours. Livingstone never smoked. Miss Mattie Hester is the United States mail-carrier over the route fiom Condar,, Laurens County, to Lothair, Montgomery County, Georgia, a distance of forty miles through a sparsely settled region, which she traverses three times a week. She drives her own mail-cart, carries a revolver, and is punctual as the sun at all seasons and In all weathers, Besides transporting the mails, she manages a farm, gets out lumber, splits fence rails and contrives to support a widowed mother, two younger sisters and a brother, while she i 3 not yet twenty years of age. J. M. Hering, of Sutter County California, has been granted a patent on an agricultural machine which ought to revolutionize something or other, inasmuch as it combines digging, subsoiling, pulverizing, planting and harrowing ; and in addition to .this, when curfew tolls the knell of parting day and lowing herds wind slowly o’er the lea, the operator can convert it into a tent or living-house and “put up” in it all night. The object ia to provide a complete farming machine, adapted to large farms, where hotel and boardinghouse accommodations are distant from the ground to be worked. Brussels, not content with having snore beautiful public buildings than any other European city save Paris, has now determined 'to rival Paris itself. King Leopold has just laid the foundations of an arch of triumph onethird larger than the celebrated one in Baris, and it is announced that this gigantic work will be comple ;ed by the closeof the century. Brussels already has the most monumental court house in all Europe—a magnificent pile, which cost vast sums of money and which contains some superb halls. The Paris triumph arch cost $2,000,000; that of Brussels is to cost $3,000,000. It will

be richly ornate with sculptures, some of which will be of gigantic proportions. J. W. Funk, a farmer ofr Heyworth, Til,, is one of the 14,000 inventors who are competing for the prize of $125,000 offered by the Goyernment of New South Wales for the trap which may be decided to be the most likely to be effective in ridding that country of its fearful pest of crop-destroying rabbits. He has received a letter from Australia saying that the committee which is to decide the matter has looked with favor upon his model, and inviting him to visit Australia and demonstrate the working of the trap. He will probably do so in a few weeks. The trap is simple and cheap. It is a device to dump the rabbits, one at a time, into a pit by means of a platform swung on pivots below a suspended bait. In a trap of similar device he caught fifty-seven rabbits in one night in a cornfield. A curious incident regarding a strait occurred during the Russian war: It would have been ludicrous, if anything can be ludicrous connected with war. Commodore Elliot was blockading a Russian squadron in the Gulf of Saghalin, on the east coast of Siberia. Thinking he had the Russians in a cul de sac, he complacently waited for them to come out, as the water was too shallow for him to attack them. As the enemy did not come out he sent in to investigate, and found, to his astonishment, that Russians and ships had vanished! While he had been awaiting for them in the south they had quietly slipped out by the north, teaching both him and the British government a rather severe lesson in geography, as it had been thought that Saghalin was an isthmus; and they were totally unaware of a narrow channel leading from the Gulf to the Sea of Okhotsk.

A father, when his daughter becam e a bride, gave her a golden casket with the injunction not to pass it into other hands, for it held a charm which in her keeping would be of inestimable value to her as the mistress of the house. Not only was she to have the entire care of it, but she was to take it every morning to the cellar, the kitchen, the dining-room, the library, the bed-room, and remain with it in each place for five minutes, looking carefully about. After the lapse of three years the father was to send the key, that the secret talisman might be revealed. The key was sent. The casket was opened. It was found to contain an old parchment, on which was written these words: “The eyes of the mistress are worth one hundred pairs of servants’ hands.” The wise father kne v that a practice of inspection followed faithfully for three years would become a habit and be selfperpetuated—that the golden casket and the hidden charm would have accomplished their mission.

The increasing tendency to specialism in all trades and professions is nowhere more marked than in the medical profession, where the young M. D. finds himself, before Iris sheepskin is fairly in his hands, considering the desirability of the “throat and lungs,” or the “eye and ear,” or some other equally profitable combination of dis orders. The result is that the “family doctor” of the old time, who attended a family from birth to death, and who was the repository Of all its woes and weaknesses, is no longer a real existence. And the average well-doctored mortal who wishes to be reasonably careful with his health finds himself strangely divided up among half a dozen specialists. To one he intrusts the care of his eyes, to another his throat, to a third his digestion, to a fourth his nerves, and, if it please Heaven to afflict him with more disorders than these, he finds a “specialist” waiting down the road to welcome each one. No doubt there is a good healthy reason at the bottom of "-all this and real benefit to be derived therefrom. No doubt the marvelous strides of medical science within the last fifty years have made the necessity for the specialist, but it touches one’s sense of the comic to have the experience of a young woman who wished not long ago to" consult Dr. Smith, an eye and ear specialist. She went to a large building given up to the use of physicians. “Ton mistake, madam,” said the first physician to whom she presented herself, “I am not Dr. Smith for the eye and 6ar, I am Dr. Smith for the throat and lungs.” “And is that Dr. Smith for the eye and ear across the hall ?” “No, madam,” he answered gravely, “that is Dr. Smith for the heart and stomach. Dr. Smith for the eye and ear is five doors doW r n the corridor.”