Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 November 1893 — NOTES AND COMMENTS. [ARTICLE]

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The women of Iceland have had municipal suffrage for more than twenty years. They are now eligible to municipal offices. A man in Washington County, Penn., has a bantam rooster that is so familiar with a cat that it can get on the feline’s back and orow without the cat’s taking any notice of it. Thb British Government report of an investigation into the epidemio of influansa of the past four years regards the proof of the contagiousness of the disease as overwhelming, and that it is not transported through tho atmosphere. The Chineso doctor's lot is not wholly a happy one. Four members of the Imperial Colloge of Physicinns at Pekin failed recently to make a proper diagnosis of the Emperor’s indisposition and were punished by being fined a year’s salary. It has been said that the world pays most to those who kill—generals and great lords; next most to those who amuse—singers and actors, while those who preaoh, teach and write for the papers come along somewhere near the bottom of the list. For what is the greatest amount of lumber used? Nine people out of ten will say for houses and buildings. It is doubtful if 35 por cent, of the lumber output goes into buildings. The railroads, farmers, and miscellaneous purposes take about 40 per oent., and the other 20 per cent, goes into boxes. The estimate is made, says the Southern Lumberman, on the judgment of some of the oldest and best informed lumbermen in the country. Thb costliest mile of railroad is a mile measured on the steel portion of the Forth bridge. The length of this portion is a mile and twenty yards, and tha cost of it was considerably over $10,000,000. The most expensive railway system in the world is the "Inner Circle” line of Londbn, which cost, including the purchase of land, from $8,000,000 to $5,000,000 per mile. The last constructed mile, between the Mansion House and Aldgato, cost altogether, including "compensations,” nearly $lO,000,0Q0.

It is reported that a company has been organised at Dundee, Scotland, for tho purpose of working the whale and seal fisheries of the Antarotic ocean. An experimental expedition was sent there during the past summer, and it has returned with the report, backed by abundant substantial evidenoe, that whales and seals are much more abundant in the Antarctic waters than in tho Arctic. It is asserted that an Antarotic sealskin is a much better article than that about which the United States has lately been having so much trouble. This company proposes to establish a depot in the Falkland islands, where the sealskins may be prepared for markot, and the sealers obtain supplies, and the product will be takon thenoe to England by a line of fast steamers. Forty years ago a mulatto boy of Chatham County, N. C., was sold into slavery and was taken to Georgia. A few days ago he returned, a venerablelooking man and worth more than SSOO, - 000. His name was Nathan, and he was sold to a man named Toomer, who made him his body-servant. He proved himself honest and faithful and enjoyed his master’s full confidence. He served Mr. Toomer until his death, shortly after tho war. His unusual intelligence, quiok perception and good judgment gained Nathan the respect and esteem of all the white people, and he acquired considerable property. He then married the daughter of Dixon, the big cotton planter, and it is well known that Dixon left his large estate to this daughter. Last month Nathan’s wife died, and she loft all her property to her husband. Nathan recently converted all bis Georgia property into money, and will, it is said, make New York City his future home. A Nbw York exchange notes the fact that the treatment of oholera invented by Dr. Elmer Lee, of Chicago, and triumphantly demonstrated in the hospitals of St. Petersburg last year, has robbed the dread disease of most of its terrors. The process is the simplest thing possible. It consists merely in flooding the intestinal canal of the patient with warm soapsuds at frequent intervals, and thus washing out and rendering harmless the cholera germs, whose ravages are carried on in the intestines. By the use of this method Health Officer Jenkins, of New York, has been able to save no less than nineteen of the twenty-two cases that have developed at Quarantine, reducing the mortality to 15 per cent. This is a wonderful achievement, considering that the ordinary death rate of oholera runs from 50 to 75 per cent., according to the violence of the plaguo. Since this discovery a person fortified with soap and water ana a good syringe need dread the cholera no more then an attack of pneumonia or bilious fever. The disease has been vpiquished and an American doctor did it. *

According to a Dutch Government report just issued, the labor question is practically unknown in the Netherlands. Strange as it may seem, the Dutch workmen like long hours and are content to live on forty cents a day. The reason why they prefer long hours to short is beoause they can thus work in the slow and leisurely manner that suits them best and can indulge their national conscience in the matter of thoroughness; and they are content with low wages beoause they know how to make them go a long way. The only thing that in any wav resembles a labor question in Holland is connected with the introduction of machinery, which puts the true Dutchman out of gear altogether, forces him to work briskly and even makes him dls cover that old-fashioned wages are not quite up to new-fashioned ideas. The alligator business in Florida, Dr. Hugh M. Smith, of the Fish Commission, informs us, is on the deolioe for want of alligators. Formerly the capture of alligators brought many « dollar to the state. Hunting was as systematic as it was relentless. “It is within bounds to say,” writes Dr. Smith, “that since 1880 not less than 2.500,000 alligators have been killed in the state, and it is not surprising that the supply has been greatly reduced in view of the more migratory habits, the remaikably slow growth of the animal, and the sacrifice of large numbers before they had reached the reproductive age.” According to the observations of these who have studied the alligator, it is not more than a foot long in a twelvemonth. He is ten years old before he is two feet tong. When he is twelve feet in length he has lived three-quarters of a century. On the St. John’s, below Palatka alligators are rapidly diminishing. In the Indian River region the headquarters of the alligator hunters are to-day at Cocoa, Melbourne, and Fort Pierce. Ten years ago 5,000 alligator skins in the season were thought to be a fair business. To-day not half this number are taken. Kissimmee, on

Lake Tohopekaliga, is the centre of the alligator hide business. In 1889 38,600 bides were taken there. It was not unusual for a hunter to kill a dozen alligators in a day. The business in hides seems to be centered in Jacksonville, but the receipts are rapidly diminishing. "The way in whioh an immonse crowd will colleot in any New York street in a few seoonds is always a matter of wonderment and comment among strangers in the city,” said a Wall street broker to a Sun reporter, "but the way a crowd sprang up from the ground in a deserted street in the dead of midnight this week greatly surprised even mo. I had remained at mv office until nearly 2 in the morning, ana was walking up Broadway for a few blocks before taking the car home. I camo opposite City Hall Park with not a soul in sight. Suddenly there was a shout of alarm behind me and a scurrying of feet. A man was pursuing another along Mail street, the first shouting ‘Murder!’ A policeman came running from tho shadow of the park: a orowd of men was at his heels; more men seemed to spring out of the ground around the Post Office, and in half a minute there wore fifty or sixty persons running after the first two men. Tho policeman caught up with the couple as they started to pummel each other, and then I saw streams of men and hoys running from doorways along Park How, aproned clerks from the post office, waiters from the restaurants, printers and newsboys from the newspaper buildings, and tramps from tho park benches, until long beforo 1 had reacned the scene of the melee, at Mail street and Park Row, there was a dense crowd of people choking Mall street from curb to curb, several hundred men and boys, where two minutes before there was not a sign or sound of life.”