Jasper Republican, Volume 2, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1875 — That Dynamite Explosion. [ARTICLE]

That Dynamite Explosion.

It is only in comparatively modern times that we have learned to blow ourselves and other people to pieces. The explosive in all its various forms of gunpowder, nitro-glycerine, dynamite or giant-powder, etc., is something new. We are unfortunately accustomed, however, to wholesale murders committed in mines by natural explosives, and in magazines and on shipboard by those of artificial make. One of the most horrible of all these accidents is that of Saturday morning, when a caseof dynamite blew up at Bremen and killed and wounded, according to the official report, 100 persons, of whom sixty were slain outright. It seems that some gigantic fool had carefully packed a package of dynamite in his luggage, and then taken passage on the steamship Mosel, from Bremen to New York. Dynamite looks like damp Graham flour, and is composed of silicious ashes or pulverized earth saturated with three times its weight of nitro, glycerine. It bums slowly in the open air, but explodes with tremendous, incomprehensible force when confined within asmall space. Underttaelattercircumstances, a sudden thump sends it flying into flame. No better material could have been selected if the Bremen explosion had been intended. The Mosel was lying a short distance from the, wharf, and her shoreward side was doubtless covered with passengers. A tug lay by her. The passengers’ baggage was being transferred to the ship. Somebody tinay have stumbled, somebody may have droppod a package—just how the explosion came we shall probably never know. It did come. The tug was blown to pieces. The steamship was so damaged that she cannot sail. Four passengers were killed. The rest of the sixty murdered ones were probably sailors, porters and ’longshoremen on the wharf. Another passenger has since tried to commit suicide but has been prevented. His deed excites the suspicion that he owned and packed the dynamite and that his criminal carelessness is responsible for the horrible massacre. He is to be examined. If the explosion had to occur it is perhaps best that it took place when and where it did. Had the Mosel been in mid-ocean she would have sunk with every soul on board.— Chicago Tribune.

—Quite recently a short-sighted husband saw a large bouquet of flowers on a chair, and wishing to preserve them from fading placed them in a basin of water. When his wife saw the “ bouquet” half an hour afterward she gave one piercing scream and fainted on the spot. Her defectivevisioned husband had mistaken her new bonnet, with its abundance of flowers, for a freshly -culled bouquet. A Covington (Ky.) man says that he bought Gladstones great pamphlet on “Vaticination” in order to learn how to escape small-pox, but the “blamed book didn’t say a word on the subject!” The annual sale of Florida curiosities is said to amount to SIOO,OOO,