Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1910 — Topics of the times [ARTICLE]

Topics of the times

Spanish Is the official language ot twenty-two nations or states. The average life of a tradesman is About two-thirds that of a farmer. The city of Durban. South Africa, "will spend $1,000,000 for electric lights ■and railways. An English agricultural society is raising a fund with which to exterminate the sparrow. Nearly every, foreign automobile builder now casts all the cylinders of his engines in a solid piece. Gas lamps are made on the lines of the electric lamp, and the deceit is so cleverly perpetrated that few suspect the difference. The fur seal will not breed in captivity. This does not apply to the hair seals, which are those so readily trained,for exhibition purposes, '-iA schooner built in Amesbury, Mass., in 1805 and used In the war of 1812 as a privateer, still is in active service in the Maine coasting trade. A French scientist has figured that It would take a 350,000,000 candle power lamp to signal Mars, and even at that the Martians would have to use telescopes magnifying ten thousand times to see it. The first carbon filaments made by Thomas Edisbn for his new incandescent la.tftp were made from thread dipped in lampblack and tar and carbonized at high temperatures. Thi3 lamp was successful enough to warrant further Investigation. An ozone generator has been installed in the Chicago public library which will generate ten thousand cubic feet of air a minute. This system not only keeps pure air In the large reading room, but acts as an automatic deodorizer and disinfectant. Inventive minds have been trying for a long time to hit upon some process by which old newspapers could be reduced to a pulp and the ink extracted, and the pulp made into printing paper again. But the extraction of the ink has hitherto been unaccomplished. Ft ran Germany, however, ocimes the news that the paper pulp is treated with alkaline solutions so as to cause a change in the greasy part of the ink so that It ceases to hold the lampblack or other pigments, and they are easily extracted from the fiber by making an emulsion of the pulp with gelatinous silica. Writing from Berlin, the correspondent of the London Daily Express refers to the prominence attained by the Jews In Germany. “Among the Roman Catholics,’’ he says, "thirteen per ten thousand, and among the Protestants 25 per ten thousand receive a university education, but among the Jews no fewer than 160 per ten thousand receive academic training. More than half the doctors and lawyers in Berlin are Jewß, and the same numerical predominance can be aoticed in most great German cities. The Jews predominate also as university professors, as teachers, as journalists, as artists and architects—in short, in all professions.” Recent studies indicate that hitherto unrecognized associations may exist among certain sets of stars, involving not only common motions in a particular direction, but similarity of physical condition. Dr. LudendorfT says that most of the principal stars in Ursa Major, the Great Bear, including tivej of those forming the well known “dipper,” constitute a definite system traveling among parallel lines in space. Ejnar Hartzsprung corroborates this, and adds a number of other conspicuous! stars, including Sirius, Beta Aurigae and Alpha Coronae, to the system. It is remarkable that of the fifteen stars included in the supposed system, no fewer than nine are double. Queensland lies in an artesian basin, “the largest known in the world,” for It covers''over half a million square miles, and its discovery and the drilling of wells have wOrked wonders in the vast areas of this western Australian country. Mosquitoes are so bad that sleepers have to build fires to keep them ofT. It seems that some of the bored wells fill large lagoons and run into shallow trenches over miles of the country. Some of these wells spurt out water at a temperature as high as 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and some only 60 degrees. Some are good for watering stock, some for irrigation and some" nave so much alkali and mineral'as to be useless, but are said to cure all manner of diseases.