Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 80, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 April 1910 — Topics the Times [ARTICLE]

Topics the Times

Chocolate is served to the ladies in the churches of Mexico. Ecuador's last cocoa crop was worth 14,383,497, and the cocoa there Is only in its infancy. One of the newest milking machines Incudes ~a pulsating vacuum pump, driven by an electric motor. Germany annually imports from Chile about half a million tons of saltpeter, valued at 123,000,000, for fertilizing purposes. Prison rations of England give 81.4 ounces of food daily to the prisoner doing hard labor, but only 46.8 ounces In the case of a prisoner doing light labor.

Mrs. T. F. Beal, a rural mail carrier of the Burbank district In California, goes over her twenty-flve-mlle route in an automobile which she has bought with her own earnings. A good authority on horses says that the gray will live the longest, and that the roans come next in order. Blacks seldom live to be over twenty, and creams rarely live more than ten or fifteen years. Consul Felix S. S. Johnson, of Bergen, reports that on September 30, 1909, the population of Norway was 2,363,511. The number of births for the third quarter of 1909 was 10,195, against 9,660 and 8,299 for the same periods in 1908 and 1907. Miss I. L. Moorman is the president of the Negro Women’s Business League of New York City. The league is soon to hold a meeting in the hope of forming a national organization of colored women in the interest of votes for women. Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont and Mrs. Ella H. Crossett are among the speakers scheduled for the meeting. Kaffir women will not pronounce their husband’s' names, or even use words which contain the emphatic syllable of those names. One old woman, being taught to say tlfe Lord’s prayer, changed the word for “come” in “Thy kingdom come,’’ to something that made nonsense, and It proved that the proper “come” word wad the main syllable of her husband’s name. A part of the historic palace of the doges is being made ready for the duke of Abruzzi, who has been appointed director general of the Third naval division, with headquarters at Venice. The Venice newspapers extend to him a welcome as the defender of the “Queen of the Sea,” made worthy by his own exploits to rank with the Venetian naval heroes. He “will begin a series of lectures on his Himalayan explorations at Easter. “I wish I had been born a man; it is the one regret of my life,” declared Mrs. Lillian Duncanson, president of the Political Equality League, before the members of the literary round table of the Chicago Culture Club recently. “I am tired of being a woman, of having to beg for better conditions, of being told *to put on a pretty gown and smile in order to influence some alderman to see things in the light he should see them as women see them.”—Chicago Tribune. You have heard of dogs who are very clever at minding sheep, but did you ever hear of one who helped to keep order in school? A teacher in Washington has a black cocker spaniel who goes every day with her to her school in a part of the town where there are so many people that there is no room for them to keep dogs in their homes. Hector loves the school children, and they love him, and when he barks at them to make them stop whispering, they obey. When they spell d-o-g he wags his tail.—Century Path. Two reasons are ascribed by French scientists for the floods that nearly overwhelmed Paris. One is the wholesale cutting down of trees in the Ardennes, . the Vosges, Burgundy apd along the affluents of the Seine. The other is the comet visitations. The theory of the noted astronomer, M. Deslandres, is that the cathodic rays of the sun, penetrating the gaseous tails of colnets, are turned into Xrays, notorious condensers of vapors. He holds that when the tall of a comet becomes entangled in the earth’s atmosphere serious floods may result.