Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1895 — NOTES AND COMMENTS. [ARTICLE]

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The Argentine Republic, which has just begun its career as a wheat exporter, expects to ship 90,000,000 bushels of last year’s crop. Out of the crop for the previous year it exported 25,000,000 bushels, chiefly to England. Pbofessor Cesare Lombroso, the famous Italian criminologist, has discovered that one of the most striking characteristics of criminals is the absence of wisdom teeth. This should not make those people, however, who boast of being without these unnecessary molars feel uncomfortable. The official estimate of wheat consumption in the United States is 4.67 bushels a head of population. It has been revised on figures representing the actual consumption of over 8,000 persons, and it is now fixed at 4.77 bushels a head. This would give 28.85 bushels as the annual consumption of the average family, with a total annual consumption for the entire country of about 334.000,000 bushels. The Frenchman who proposes to set out for the North Pole in a balloon argues that the polar circle is an ideal place for an airship, as the temperature is even, the earth unobstructed by vegetation, the daylight uninterrupted for six months, and electric discharges rare. Of course, the balloon will be a very elaborate affair, and it will be provisioned for over 100 days. It is not to start until July, 1896.

During the fiscal year which closed (4,130,440,000) cigars were manufactured in the United States. This is an increase of 63.522,000 over the number manufactured during the previous year, yet nevertheless the United States Tobacco Journal claims that the cigar trade is being damaged by the increasing use of bicycles. The theory is that the time spent on a bicycle is withdrawn from the possible time for cigarsmoking. Union County, New Jersey, has found good roads profitable, the increase in tax valuations having been marked this year. The total assessed values for 1895 are $35,972,500, an increase over 1894 of $1,359,600. The most conspicuous gain was made by Summit, which stands at $1,866,000, an increase of $116,000, or over 25 per cent. Westfield advanced $216,600t0 $1,448,600, and Plainfield, Cranford and Union had substantial additions to the assessed vale of their property. The completion of the Eleventh Census of the United States is now promised within this year by a report from Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright to Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith. He finds the total cost to date is $10,531,142, and the chief cause of delay has been the population schedule. The only other parts remaining uncompleted are the vital statistics, a purt of the compendium and the second edition of the abstract and the statistical atlas.

Lunacy is on the increase in England, according to the report of the British Commissioners on Lunacy, issued recently. The total number of lunatics, idiots and persons of unsound mind was, on January 1, of this year 94,081, an increase of 2,014 over the number for the preceding year. The increase was confined almost wholly to the pauper class, and is due apparently, it is said, to the more general reception in asylums of cases of simple mental decay resulting from extreme old age. A recent compilation of New England vital statistics shows that in 1892 twenty-two marriages in every thousand of population occurred in the towns of more than 10,000 population, while in the villages and in the country the marriage rate was five less in the thousand. The city birth-rate in higher in about the same proportion, but the death-rate is also higher. The statistics indicate that while the chances of sufficient food are better in the cities, the chances of prolonged life are better in the country in spite of short rations.

Boston has a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who, perhaps, has not emulated Ida Lewis, yet she is an accomplished oarswoman as well as a-versa-tile writer. Miss Louise Lynden has lived with her father on that beautiful headland for nearly fifteen years, and although a graduate of the Boston Girl’s High School in 1879, has preferred to keep herself on the island summer and winter, ever since her father was appointed as keeper of the light in 1880. Miss Lynden is an accomplished photographer, and many of her charming stories are illustrated by her own pictures. The trouble with the Bannocks recalls the fact that the Indian population of the United States in 1890 was set down at 248,253, not including the native inhabitants of Alaska, who numbered 32,052. The Indians living on the reservations and receiving assistance from the Government numbered 133,417. It is believed by many who have made a special study of Indian archaeology that the number of Indians within the present territory of the United States, at the time of the discovery of America, was little if any greater than the number now existing, a statement which will strike many with surprise. One of the largest private estates in the world is that of Dr. W. Seward Webb, at Shelburne, Vt., on the shores of Lake Champlain. The property consists of more than 4,000 acres of beautiful rolling land bordering on the lake. There Dr. Webb maintains one of the most magnificent establishments on the Continent —Shelburne House—where he lives the greater part of the year and entertains in royal style. *He has a stable of blooded horses, a fleet of yachts on the lake, and has a game preserve of several hundred acres. He can entertain his friends with racing, yachting and hunting and fishing, all of which sports he enjoys himself. The two new battle ships of which plans are now being drawn are not to cost over $4,000,000 each. Turning labor into time at a dollar a day, the census average, this'would make ( the maximum cost of each the work of 4,000 men for 1,000 days, or about three years; This would include, of

coarse, all the time spent in preparing all the materials of all kinds—as in digging the coal to heat the furnace to make iron and steel for nails and armor and guns, felling the trees to make lumber, digging the mineral for the paint, planting and cultivating the beans for making the oil, and so on. So that probably the estimate above is well within the actual cost of labor time required. The cooks of the twentieth century will have comparatively easy times. Everything will be done from scientific reasons. Meals simple and most beautifully served, for the eye as well as the palate should be pleased. Foods eaten for a special purpose, not simply to “fill up.” Eating, in other words, will be a refining element rather than a coarse one: and our lady will be proud to say that she is a cook, because it will require more brains to be a cook than to be a physician. The cook will have to know all, while medicine will be divided into specialties, a man finding that the whole human being is more than he can comprehend in a lifetime. A. band of about 7,000 horses was bought on a range in Umatilla county, Wash., recently by the Portland Horse Meat Canning Company, at $3 a head. This was the price on the range. The horses will be taken to Portland as required. Three hundred were sent on as soon as the sale was concluded. The agent of the company, who is traveling through the range country, says that the hide, mane, and tail alone of each horse will bring $2.50, leaving the entire carcass a clear profit. There is a singular reticence about the actual purposes for which the carcasses are to be used, and various people claiming to be connected with the concern talk variously about fertilizers, grease, canned steaks, and many other products. Irrigation experiments along a new line have been making during the past few months in the “arid region” of western Kansas, where the rainfall is insufficient for cropraising, and where no river water for irrigation can be obtained, and so far they have been a great success. The plan is to sink wells to a waterbearing strata and pump the water for irrigating the crops. The State Government is making the experiments, and a farm has been established at Goodland. The engineers report that there is a water-bearing sand, fully one-third of which is water, underlying the whole of the arid district at an average depth of twenty-one feet. This will yield more than a sufficient amount of water for all purposes of irrigation, and it can be economically raised. If all this turns out as prophesied the arid district promises to become one of the most fertile regions in Kansas. Few Americans are aware of the fact that if it were not for the little island of Sicily, there would be no lemons, nor are many aware of the great importance of this commerce and of its necessity to the United States. The production of lemons in America is so limited at the present time, both as regards quantity and seasons, that all the California and Florida products do not supply 10 per cent, of the country’s needs. After the months of August and September, when our domestic lemon crops mature, except for Sicily we should be without any lemons whatsoever, except a few that Spain sends us during the rest of the year. Accurate figures show that from September to April 30, during the past five years, the importations from Sicily each year have been about one million two hundred thousand boxes, each containing 300 lemons, or equal to 360,000,000 lemons.

A recent address before the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce by an American manufacturer named Pearce is rich with facts about the present relations of different countries, and especially of the Orient. Mr. Pearce has just been around the world taking observations. He says that 60 per cent, of the jute mills of Dundee, Scotland, are idle because Great Britain cannot compete with India. At Manchester 50,000 cotton spinners are protesting against the duty on English cotton goods imported into India. Children work at the cotton looms in India for 5 cents a week, and has increased her cotton product fourfold in the‘last four years. China is also beginning to spin cotton, and England must soon lose this market also. Spinners get 25 cents a week there, against $2.50 a day here. Mr. Pearce believes that it is not the competition of Europe that this country need fear, but that of India, China and Japan.

In his article on what to avoid in bicycling, printed in the North American Review, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, a well-known English medical authority, writes that excessive cycling is dangerous because of its effect on the heart, the motion of which he has known to be raised from 80 to 200 beats a minute by the exercise. He thinks too there is a tendency to develop the lower limbs at the expense of the upper. “There is little doubt of the correctness of these observations,” adds the New York World, “and they are the more trustworthy because Sir Benja 7 min is himself a cyclist convinced of the benefit of the exercise when moderately indulged. His conclusions are supported by Dr. Reilly, of the Chicago, Board of Health, who declares that as a result of excessive bicycling the deaths from nervous diseases in that city has been tripled. Perhaps this is an extreme view, but it is not doubtful that a person of sedentary life and indoor habits can commit suicide in a most delightful way by “scorching” through his holidays on a bicycle. No form of exercise is more attractive, and when it is indulged in with a knowledge of the limits of endurance no exercise is likely to prove inore healthy. But thousands of young people and a good many older ones who think they are strengthening themselves by exercise are really wrecking their nervous systems by overexertion and “overtraining.” All this may be trusted to right itself in time, for the bicycle has come to stay. But in the mean time those who cannot learn except by their own experience will go on filling tb ■ graveyards.