Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 July 1885 — HISTORICAL. [ARTICLE]

HISTORICAL.

A gilt nutmeg was formerly a common gift at Christmas. The Romans used movable type to mark their pottery and endorse their books. There was a tunnel under the rivet Euphrates when ancient Babylon was in all its glory, and thp ancient Egyptians had a Suez Canal. The principle of the stereoscope was known to Euclid, described by Galen 1500 years ago, and more fully in 1599 A. D., in the works of Baptist Porta. M. Layard found in Nineveh a magnificent lens of rock-crystal, which Sir David Brewster considered a true optical lens and the origin of the microscope. It is difficult to discover why the glpve was recognized as a sign of defiance. It is suggested that the custom of dropping or sending the glove as the signal of a challenge, may have been derived from the circumstance of its being the cover of the hand, and therefore not for the hand itself. In 1687 an excise duty on tobacco was laid in England, which alarmed the Virginia planters, arid they attempted to retaliate by procuring acts of the Assembly for the encouragement of domestic manufactures, that they might import leaf from the Mother Country. King James disallowed these acts as hostile to English interests. A similar attempt failed in Maryland. The idea which associate’s the dog’s howl with the approach of death is probably derived from a conception of an Aryan mythology, which represents a dog as summoning the departed soul. Throughout all Aryan mythology the souls of the dead are supposed to ride on the night wind with their howling dogs, gathering into their throng the souls of those just dying as they pass by their houses. During the reign of Catherine 11. of Russia, I alatin, a peasant, made a musical repeating watch, about the size of an egg, which had within it a representation of Christ’s tomb, with sentinels on guard. On pressing a spring the stone would be rolled from the tomb, the angels appear, the holy women enter the sepulchre and the same chant which is sung in the Greek Church at Easter eve accurately performed. The vault of the Cloaca Maxima, in Rome, dates from the sixth century B. C. Canal burying was one of the first conditions of existence on the western coast of central Italy, where the dranage of the swamps, the discharge of the mountain lakes, which otherwise overflow from time to time, desolating the lower country, and the regulation of the river courses, alone made possible the settlement of a people and the founding of flourishing cities west of the Appenines. It is therefore not improbable that the great canal discovered by Dennis, which once drained the swampy valley of the Marta, preceded the Cloaca Maxima, and, indeed, antedated the Roman period altogether.