Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 March 1910 — SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY [ARTICLE]

SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY

Chinese schools and students have grown rapidly in the last decade. Babylon’s inhabitants frequented libraries seventeen centuries before Christ.

Under the new law for buildings in New York city the number of dark rooms in tenements have been reduced from 250,000 to 101,117. “Let there be light,” is the motto of the board of inspection. Of the 1,467 foreigners at the colleges of the United States, 460 hail from North America, 458 from Asia, 318 from Europe, only 154 from South America, 64 from - Australia and 18 from Africa.

The United States has more (22,244,446) dairy cows than any other country in the world; more horses, 23,000,532; mort mules, 4,056,399; more swine, 57,976,361, and (except British India) more cattle, 73,246,573. In a Belfast breach of promise case the man, a farmer, won. He agreed to marry a spinster if she could raise JSOO. She was able to get together only S3OO, so the farmer called it off, despite the fact thR he had ordered the clergyman to be on hand to marry ihem. The judge said that the promise to marry was conditional, and the condition had not been fulfilled. Robert Wynne, the former United States consul-general in London, intends to resume newspaper work in the British capital. Before Mr. Wynne became postmaster-general of the United States he had a long and brilliant journalistic career, being also president of the Gridiron Club at Washington. He is intimately acquainted at first hand with London and its celebrities.

There is an old superstition that if a spider settles on one’s clothes it Is a sign that he will shortly receive money. “When a spider is found upon our clothes,” •says an old writer, “we used \to say, some money Is coming toward us. The moral is this: Such who imitate the industry of that contemptible creature may, by God’s blessing, weave themselves into wealth and procure a plentiful estate.” To get rock for the Morena dam in southern California, one of the biggest blasting operations on record has just been successfully carried out. Describing the feat, the Engineering Record says -that a tunnel 125 feet long was first driven into the face of the granite. In this chamber was placed 38.950 pounds of powder and dynamite. This was exploded by electric fuses and dislodged 120,000 cubic 'yards of rock.

Blue books have a reputation for typographical accuracy almost equal to that of the famous Clarefidon Press, which is said to offer a guinea reward for the detection of a single printer’s error in the editions of the Holy Scriptures. A “cancel” note just received from the king’s printers shows the pfemarkable anxiety to insure correctness. It Informs us that in a chart attached to the “Army Medical Report of 1908” there is a misplaced dot. Can this example of minute corrigenda be beaten? —London Chronicle.

In Belgium a prisoner has turned the old trick and escaped through the prison window hospital. The prince of rogues weighed 300 pounds and found himself too large to pass through his cell window, so he played sick and “soldiered” around until they put him into the prison hospital. He ate nothing to speak of for fifty days, and became so thin that he easily squeezed' through a window of the “chronic” ward, having at odd times sawn through the bars. Once through the window friends below helped him to the ground and took him in an auto.

The cutting blowpipe, of which so many surprising things have been reported, has recently been Improved in France in a way to render it more generally useful. Two inflammable gases must be employed. One is required to keep the metal at a high teipperature. The other is oxygen to concentrate action by oxidation along the line ot the cut. For heating, either i.oal Jks, acetylene or hydrogen is-employed. but as there is sometimes difficulty in procuring a supply of those gases the new blowpipe is arranged to use instead the ordinary gasoline employed by motorists.

The charge that bees are destructive to the fruit on the tree is not borne out by the facts. Their tongues are formed exclusively for the extraction of sweet juices, and their mandibles are unable to pierce the skin of a fruit. Grapes have been taken intact from the interior of a hive' in which they had been allowed to remain four days. A grape which had been smeared with honey was licked clean, but was not injured. The bees inserted their tongues in pinholes' made In the skin of a grape, and extracted some of the juice, but they were unable to enlarge the holes.

Writing' about the family of King Albert of Belgium, a Berlin correspondent says: “Little Prince Leopold is making rapid progress as a violinist. He displays no phenomenal talent The music teacher, has a painstaking and intelligent assistant in Queen Elizabeth, who is an accomplished violinist A picture which was recently taken shows the queen in a skirt and a white shirtwaist, with not the smallest ornament visible, standing in a plainly furnished room, violin in hand, teaching the little prince. It is the kind of picture which wll go fat toward winning the respect and estem ot the people."