Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 April 1896 — Current Condensations. [ARTICLE]

Current Condensations.

Money is wasted recklessly every day; some people pay eighty dollars for a guitar. If a woman can boast that she never thought an oath, no one ever stepped on her corns. When a man eats too much and becomes sick he says that he lias been working too hard. Under the new Oregon ugame law sportsmen are permitted to kill but twenty upland game birds a day. English curates are thinking of forming themselves into a professional union, on the plan of the trades unions. No woman should ever marry a widower who has figured out how much his first wife’s final sickness and death cost him. The famous collection of coins which the late William Bayne spent sixty years in getting together is to be sold at auction in London. Dr. Bohr has gone to the Faroe Islands to study the breathing apparatus of the diver birds. In the same ship went the Ehlers expedition that is to investigate leprosy in Iceland. A proposition has been made to erect a statue in Copenhagen in memory of Dr. Hans Wilhelm Meyer, who discovered that “adenoid vegetations,” as he called them, are the most fertile cause of deafness and imperfect nasal respiration in children. A peculiar form of asphalt paving has recently been tried in France. The asphalt powder is heated to 120 degrees and modeled under a pressure of about five and one-half tons per square inch into blocks, which are afterwards set in cement mortar. By a recent decree of chancery only chartreuse made at the monastery of La Grande Chartreuse may be sold under that name in England. A firm at Voiron pretends to have the recipe used by the monks and to make the same liquor, but it has been enjoined by the French courts from using the name. One of the courts of New’ Jersey has decided that a husband who drives his wife from home is guilty of abandonment, and that the wife has the right to control the domestic affairs of the family, notwithstanding the opposition of the husband or any of his relatives—and the woman in this case was a second wife, at that. ’ An enthusiastic horticulturist, when he heard of the massacre of the English missionaries in China, wrote in his farm journal: “While we deplore bloodshed, it must be confessed that the English and American missionaries are a selfish lot, lacking in patriotism. They never have sent a seed of the famous melons of Asia back to their own country.” The new municipal technical school opened the other day at Birmingham, England, contains 134 rooms of which 116 are devoted to teaching, occupies an area of 2,000 square feet and has cost £89,000. Its expenditure is about £IO,OOO a year. The school is used by 1,600 students, of whom about twothirds are instructed in science and onethird in metallurgy. The Indian pharmacopoeia comprised thoroughwort, spurge and Indian hemp, used as emetics; the bark of the horse-chestnut and butternut, used as cathartics. They were also acquainted with many poisons, most of which they used on their weapons. For asthma they employed tobacco and sassafras; for coughs, slippery elm; for dropsy, the wild gooseberry; for wounds, powdered puff balls. They treated boils with onion poultices. In a room over Benson's saloon, in Bessemer, Ala., recently John Underwood, a miner, had a falling out with Mary Pratt, with whom he was drinking. During the course of the quarrel Underwood pulled a pistol and shot the woman square in the mouth at short range and then lied, thinking she was dead. When the woman was raised from the floor a few minutes iff terward she calmly spit the pistol ball out of her mouth. Beyond the loss of a few front teeth, which the ball struck in passing, she was not much hurt.