Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1900 — QUEER STORIES [ARTICLE]

QUEER STORIES

When the President sits at a dinner table even, as the host, and there are ladies present, he is always served first, as are all other rulers. It is an old custom observed iu all countries. One of the strangest streams in the world is in East Africa. It flows in the direction of the sea. but never reaches it. Just north of the equator, and when only a few miles from the Indian ocean, It flows in a desert, when It suddenly and completely disappears. According to a writer in Science, the demand for eagles' plumes to adorn ladies’ hats has suddenly put the turkey buzzard in great jeopardy; because the supply of eagles not lieinfi equal to the demand, buzzards' feathers are substituted for those of the nobler bird. The parliament building in Wellington. New Zealand, is the largest woollen structure in the world. In Wellington and some other New Zealand towns almost every house is constructed of wood. Large churches and important business premises are built of the same material. Prof. Nussbeaum of Hanover has discovered that the plastering in the walls seriously affects the acoustic properties of a room. Any mixture of sand with the plaster spoils the reverberation of musical tones. The best results are obtained by using pure gypsum that has been heated to a white heat. Prof. Ewing, the English physicist, said in a recent lecture, according to The American Electrician, that a Chinese navigator named Hoang Ti so long ago as twenty-four centuries before Christ used a magnet for navigating a fleet of ships. "This presumably was the first use of the mariner's compass. The form in which he is said to have used it was that of a fragment of lodestone, which was floated so as to be free to revolve. Lodestone, it will be remembered, is a natural magnet, consisting of the natural magnetic oxide of iron; The mariner’s compass of Chinese origin was first brought to Em rope in the thirteenth century by a man named Marco Polo. Notwithstanding these early uses of the magnet, the science of magnetism is only 300 years old the present year, as Jt date* from the publication of Gilbert’s famous book in the year 1600.”