Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 134, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 June 1910 — SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY [ARTICLE]

SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY

Old age Insurance is compulsory In Germany. Sweden and Spain have the fewest alien residents. Four and a half palllion gross boxes of matches are used in London in a year. A watch ticks 157,680,000 times in a year, and the wheels travel 3,558% miles. As a general rule, a man’s hair turns gray five years earlier than a woman’s. * * During the year 1909 the London dog-catchers caught 44,900 and dispatched 21,253. It is estimated that the coal mines already developed contain enough coal to supply the world for a thousand years. The natives of Korea carry visiting cards which measure about twelve Inches square, and when their use is required they are merely shown. Bahia Blanca, Argentina, is now the largest wheat shipping port In South America. It has a population of forty thousand and is growing rapidly. The Farthing Gazette, probably the cheapest daily newspaper In existence, has been started in Moscow, and has already a considerable circulation. There was to be an attack by night. The darkness was Impenetrable. A sergeant addressed his section as follows: “Now, pay attention, No. 2 section. We are going to do a night attack; there’ll be no talking or smoking; if there are any orders to be passed down I will just tip you the wink!” Peter the Great, Russia’s famous czar, when he was staying in England had a particular liking for the companionship of Halley, after whom the comet is named. After carousing with him at Deptford one evening, Peter wheeled the astronomer in a barrow through a yew hedge and did such damage that he had to pay handsomely to John Evelyn, the owner. Edward Fitz Gerald, the translator of the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, was a more or less genial opponent of matrimony as a state. One day he said to his friend, Miss Ellen Churchyard, of Woodbridge: “Do you know, Nell, what marriage Is?” Miss Churchyard thought mot “Then I’ll tell you,” said he. “Marriage is standing at one’s desk, nicely settled to work, when a great big bonnet pushes in at the door and asks you to go for a walk with it.”

It is proposed to establish a wireless telegraph station at the meteorological observatory on Mt. Mirador, in the Philippines, to give warning of typhoons to vessels in the China sea and points along the China coast. A similar station will probably be established at Santo Domingo de Basco, on the Island for communicating Information of the presence of typhoons in that vicinity to the headquarters of the Philippine weather bureau at Manila. Tin holds chief place in Siam’s metal resources and is found throughout the Siamese portion of the Malay peninsula. The average annual production is about 5,175 tons, valued at $4,110,000. English mining companies and the Chinese are the chief workers for tin. Gold stands second to tin in the country’s mineral resources, but thus far its working has not proved profitable. Copper and lead mines have aIBO proved a failure. Transportation cost is enormous, but railways are being extended north and south. When the British square at the battle of Abu Klea, in the Nubian desert, wsb penetrated by the dervishes one of them attempted to spear a gunner who was in the act of ramming home a charge. The Briton brained the Sudanese, but the rammer head split on the man’s hard skull. Next day the gunner was sent for. Mistaking the reason, and knowing from experience that soldiers are charged for government property which they break, he led off: "Please, sir, I’m very sorry I broke the rammer, but I never thought the fellow’s head could be so hard. A’U pay for the rammer so as to hear no more of the case.’’ It is a somewhat curious fact, if it is a fact, that the last of the terrestrial continents to be explored is the largest mass of raised land in the world. The concentration of attention upon the South pole since Commander Peary landed the other end of our axis makes it highly pFobable that the antarctic antipodes will soon be dangling from some explorer’s belt. Incidentally, the south polar continent will be opened, If not to the settler, at least to the mapmaker. We already know something of its fringe at a few points, and Lieutenant Shackleton pushed into it south of Mounts Erebus and Terror for several hundred miles, but the greater portion of its surface Is still terra incognita.—Collier’s. Men of science are generally agreed that birds are nature’s great check on the excess of Insects, and that they maintain the balance between plant and Insect life. Ten thousand caterpillars, It has been estimated, could destroy every blade of grass on an acre of cultivated land. The insect population of a single cherry tree infested with aphides has been estimated by a prominent entomologist at no less than twelve million. The bird population of cultivated country districts has been estimated at from seven hundred to one thousand a square mile. This la small, compared with,, the number of Insects, yet, as each bird consumes hundreds of insects every day, the latter are prevented from becoming the scourge they would be but for their feathered enemies.