Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 March 1891 — SOMEWHAT CURIOUS. [ARTICLE]

SOMEWHAT CURIOUS.

The first sugar cane cultivated in the United States was near New Orleans, in 1751. The seal is a voracious creature. A full grown one consumes about ten pounds of meat every day. —The French five and ten-centime pieces, it is said, are hereafter to he coined with holes in them, like Chinese currency. •Two convicts have died in the Concord, Mass., reformatory from drinking alcoholine, a preparation used in the shoeshop. Two Portuguese pugilists recently engaged in prize fight for 1,127 rounds. They fought six hours a day, stopping at noon to eat and smoke. A man with a mania for starting en« gines has been arrested at Fresno, CaL He has started several engines that were side tracked and caused much damage. Henry Kramer, a lineman, recently received an electric shock at Louisville, Ky., and has become hopelessly insane, believin he is pursued by an electric ghost. ■■ ■ Ne&r Bordeaux, France, there is a buoy in the harbor which is connected with the mainland by telephone. Ships arriving can thus communicate with their owners.

Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee raise an average of 2,978,800 bushels of peanuts a year. The annual value of the crop average |2,500,000 for the last four years. Recent statistics show that French railways annually kill one person out of 2,000,000. while in England 21,000,000 are carried before one meets a violent death. The "manna” which fell from the sky in Asia Minor last August, and was baked into bread, has recently. been examined by men of science, and is identified as a lichen. People who are fortunate enough to possess first editions of Burns will do well to send them into the market while the craze lasts, A copy which sold for £G6 in 1887 sold for £l2O last season. In Switzerland every man is his own assessor. After a man’s death the government carefully investigates his estate, and if he has been defrauding the treasury it collects the back taxes with interest. Eighty per cent, of the people of Unionville, Mo., are church members. There are hardly enough sinners in the whole town to get up a dance or a card party. In Germany 5,500,000 women earn their living by industrial pursuits, in England 4,000,000, in France 3,750,000, in Austrian-Hungary about the same, and in America, including all occupations, over 2,700,000. ' A Missouri man has collected over six thousand different kinds of wood', petrifactions and relics from all parts of the world. He expects to exhibit them at the Worls’s Fair.

A woman in Monroe, Me., has in ten months made 1,876 vests, for which phe has received $2lO, besides doing her housework. According to these figures she got but a fraction over eleven cents a piece for making the vests, The young ladies of Quincey, Mich., have a ‘ guess party.’’ The ladies send the gentlemen invitations reading: "Party in our set this evening. Guess where and come there.” It is needless to say that the boys get around late, &b they frequently visit a dozen houses before finding the right one. Gum arabic, which was once universally used, has become very scarce and dear, and a substitute is being made for it from starch, which is subjected under pressure and at a high temperature to the action of sulphurous acid. The product, after neutralization, is soluble and extremely adhesive.