Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1895 — NOTES AND COMMENTS. [ARTICLE]

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

One result of the increase fn the price of petroleum throughout Germany has been to cause inventors to apply themselves to attempting to devise some sort of a substitute for the staple. A photograph album will be required in the saloons of New Zealand if the proposed local option bill Is carried into effeet. A clause in this bill provides that everyone convicted of habitual drunkenness shall be photographed at his own expense, and every saloonkeeper in the district where be lives must be supplied with a copy. Brooklyn has established a great water tower, sixty-five feet high, as a part of the fire department equipment of that city. It is intended to counteract the evils attendant upon the erection of enormously high buildings that are now becoming a most serious menace to life and property in all the large commercial cities of the country. It is often supposed that boys in growing keep ahead of girls; but recent measurements disprove this. The boys, up to their eleventh year, were found to run about a quarter to half an inch taller than the girls. They were then overtaken by the girls who surpassed them in height till their sixteenth year, when the boys again grew faster than the girls, and came to the front. “We New Englanders/' says the Zion’s Herald, “have been talking many years about annexing various parts of Canada, but they are in reality turning the tables upon ua. Nova Scotia, forinstance, is annually annexing New England. If you go down to Nova Scotia in July or August you will be convinced that there can hardly be a New Englander left at home —that is a New Englander of the better sort—you will find so many Massachusetts sehoeima’ams, and Boston doctors, and clergymen, and writers, and other professional people from New England and New York down there.” The New York Sun is glad to hear of the revival of silk-worm culture in Georgia, and hopes that those engaged in this business will prosecute it with greater perseverance than did their predecessors. The trouble is not a lack of perseverance, but that industry in this country has so far found more profitable employment than in tending* silk worms. The work is not difficult, but the pay is very small, and so long as the Old World can do this work so much more cheaply than we it will make silk production unprofitable here. Cheap as cotton has been and yet is, the growing of cotton pays better than does the care and feeding of silk worms. It is said that the future prosperity of many portions of the State of Washington depends upon finding some feasible method of exterminating the myriads of squirrels that infest the State. Traps, guns, bombs, arsenic and strychnine are being extensively employed for the purpose . The bombs operate on the same principle as the giant powder cones now in general use, except that they are charged with sulphur and other paralyzing ingredients, and at the close of the process a slight explosion occurs, producing a pyrotechnic display that sends the victims off to squirrel heaven in a blaze of glory, so to speak, from beneath the depths of the earth. A marveloi'S story is that which comes from Arizona, where a few months ago some prospectors in the Bradshaw Mountains came upon a cliff dwellers’ village in one of the most inaccessible canons of that range, the largest village of the kind ever yet discovered. Several of the houses were explored and large quantities of pottery and some instruments, evidently used for cultivating the soil, were found. In one, the skeleton of a man, not over 4 feet 8 inches in height, was discovered. The canon at this place is half a mile wide, and shows evidence of having been cultivated. If this theory proves to be true, it will throw more light on the habits of this little known people. So far as known, no other evidence has been discovered of cliff dwellers having cultivated the soil.

The largest railway map in the world has just been mounted in the Broad street station of the Pennsylvania Railroad, at Philadelphia. It was made by the American Bank Note Company, of New York, and is 112 sept 5 inches long by 15 feet high, and includes the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, between Norfolk on the south and the Great Lakes on the north, giving a complete representation of the Pennsylvania Railroad, its leased lines and western connections. A railway map of such colossal dimensions has never before been attempted, much less carried to a successful completion, and when the final touches were given the work before an admiring crowd, gathered from many parts of the country, it was conceded that the beautiful painting was worthy of ranking among the most interesting sights of Philadelphia. Here is a fact to astound one—even the reader that may be old enough to vouch for its authenticity, says the New Science Review: In 1845 (but half a century ago), when only 2,000 or 8,000 miles of railroad lines had been operated in our mother country, a slender pamphlet of thirtyfour pages, bearing, even at that time, the familiar name of “Bradshaw,’’was more than sufficient to contain the time tables of all the trains of Great Britain. In 1842 Queen Victoria refused to travel by railway, and it is recorded of Prince Albert that, in going to Windsor, he was wont to say, “Not quite so fast, next time, Mr. Conductor, if you please.” In our own country many are still living who have watched the development of the greatest railway system in the world, who have seen the steady and amazing advance from Peter Cooper’s locomotive, weighing less than a ton, which, with difficulty, outstripped in speed a gray horse, to locomotives weighing more than seventy-five tons, which easily run sixty, and can even exceed seventy miles an hour. Moreover, in the life of the present generation, the railroads in the United States have been

quadruplet! fir mileage; they havw attained to the enormous proportions* of two hundred thousand miles ; they have cost close upon tea billion dollws; they employ more than a million men, and they run more than a million cars, which is- to say that, stretched out in a straight line, withlocomotives and tenders, they would form a train more than seven thousand miles long.