Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 February 1910 — Topits of The Times [ARTICLE]

Topits of The Times

At Freiburg, Germany, is a rose bush bearing ten thousand buds. Snails boiled in barley water were popular once as a cure for a cough. In certain parts of Germany it is regarded as a death warning to hear a cricket’s cry. Nearly ten thousand beds in London hospitals are daily occupied by the sick and maimed poor. An experiment by an Ohio company of curing tobacco by heat from natural gas stoves has proved successful. Piassava fiber at on time brought up to $336 a ton in Liberia. Competition In other African Countries and in South America has forced this price down at times to as low as S4B a ton. The report from Abyssinia that King Menelek had died and. the dlspatch from Addis Ababa the next day that the king was still alive added another paragraph to “Menelek’s death record,” as kept by a New York newspaper man. According to this tabulation, the dusky rul§r has been reported dead forty-one times, seventeen times in the year 1909. Fourteen young women have been established' as ticket sellers at the subway stations of the Hudson River tunnel system. The general manager of the system is reported to have said that these young ticket sellers are paid it the same rate as men and are quicker in giving change and more courteous. He also thinks it is possible to get a better class of women than men to perform such duties. At 31, Rennl planned and built the London bridge; Tescot, the Louvre; Christopher Wren was commissioned to rebuild St. Paul’s, London; Champollion announced his wonderful discovery of the Egyptian alphabet; Maurice of Saxony secured religious liberty for the Protestants in Germany by the memorable treaty of Passau, and Jenner discovered the virus to counteract smallpox and kindred diseases by vaccination.

After centuries the near east is in the world’s race for growth and progress. Port Said, fifty years ago a small Arab camp, now has a population of 50,000. From one hut, in 1830, Pirseus grown to 80,000. Mersine, not in existence when Ibrahim Pasha anchored his fleet where it now stands, has 22,000; Beirut has multiplied 6,000 inhabitants into 150,000. Gaza increased from in 1840, with small growth till 1887, to 48,000 in 1907. When some of the coolies of the Bangkok United Club opened a door in a small room under the ladies’ staircase the other morning they found that a large python had taken up its abode within. There was a stampede immediately, and some members of the club, hearing the noise, went to investigate the cause. By this time the snake was aroused and glided away down a large ventilating shaft. The python was between ten and twelve feet in length.—Java Times. In the seventeenth century all the abnormally large and small folks of Austria were assembled in Vienna in response to a whim of the empress. As circumstances required that all should be housed in one building there was a fear that the imposing proportions Of the giants would terrify the dwarfs. But the dwarfs teased and tormented the giants so 1 that these overgrown mortals complained with tears in their eyes and as a consequence sentinels had to be placed to protect the giants from their pygmy persecutors. For the smallest men had the biggest brains and the longest tongues. At the battle of Mars la Tour between the French and Germans in 1870 thirteen French soldiers of the Sixtyfourth regiment, though opposed to a whole German battalion, refused to surrender, and getting behind a fallen tree, fought on till all were shot down except three. ‘ The position was then rushed, and the survivors were about to be bayonetted when the French corporal gave the Masonic “sign of distress.” The German leader also a Mason, at once checked his .men, crying, “Don’t harm him; h is my brothIng, “Don’t harm him; he is my brothhim. The Frenchmen were made prisoners. —London Graphic.