Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 68, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1916 — SCRAPS [ARTICLE]

SCRAPS

South China has no roadways. Soap ip 83 cfents a pound in Germany. Sorghum grain is a valuable poultry feed. German helmets are nearly as light as straw hats. The cork oak of Spain is said to grow best in poorest soil. The Chinese government is about to open its first aviation school. Paper covers to protect automobiles in storage have been invented. The steel mast of an Atlantic coast oil barge is used as a smokestack from the galley. The earth under a blanket of snow is usually ten degrees warmer than the air above it. Because of the scarcity of wood in Switzerland about 70 per cent of the ties on the government railroads are metal. Diseases of animals cause losses of $212,000,000 a year in the United States. Much of this loss is preventable. Of the 800 German missionaries engaged in different parts of the British empire before the war, 400 were in India. Wash water used in the churn should be approximately the same temperature as the buttermilk, or within two degrees of it. Because of the war®Switzerland has increased its acreage under cultivation in grains by more than 20 per cent over the 1914 figures. A recently patented attachment for phonographs displays the notes and words of a song as its record is being played by the machine. New apparatus for filling* automobile tires with air automatically cuts off the supply, when the overinflation danger point is reached.

Air-cooling methods of the rapid- | fire guns now in use have proved' inadequate, and the soldiers seem to think that water-cooling is superior. Australia avoids orphan’ asylums, by sending parentless children to private families, which are paid for their care until they are years old. Dr. L. O. Howard, chief bureau of entomology at ton, D. C., says there is no srayifr thing known to science as a silent mosquito. Rbcent observations made in northern Norway indicate that the average display of aurora borealis takes place at *a height of from sixty to sixty-five miles. Frightened by a mouse, a woman guest of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, New York, shrieked so loudly while taking a bath that hotel detectives almost broke into the bathroom. Miss Veronjca Williams, who keeps a news stand in a New York hotel, was much surprised to have Pedro Pineri, just returned from Mexifr City, give her a fifty-peso Carranza note for an evening paper. While she was trying to figure out how much change to give back, Mr. Pineri, thinking the note might not be enough, handed her another one and told her to keep the change if there was any. • ' In Duma’s novel, “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne,” he introduces the story of the man with the iron mask as being the brother of Louis XIV, This, however, has been proved the mere invention of Vontaire, who created the story In one of his romances. While many still believe the mysterious stranger was Charles I of England, historians claim he was but an obscure Italian political adventurer known as Count Matthloil. Yet to this prisoner was accorded great deference.