Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 December 1892 — SOMEWHAT CURIOUS. [ARTICLE]

SOMEWHAT CURIOUS.

The London Museum contains th*, first envelope ever made. It was used riirMay, 1696. TZ The coolie, fed on rice, is more active and can enduro more than the negro fed on fat meat. The weight required to crush a square inch of brick varies from 1,200 to 4,500 pounds. Flies are so pestilential in Siam that every soldier is compelled to assist in reducing their number by catching enough every day to fill a match box. Cripple Creek, a well known mining town of Colorado, now has a population of over 10,000 people, while a year ago there were less than fifty ■ persons within its'hordevs, The English Court of Queen’s Bench has decided that grocers may weigh paper with tea, coffee, sugar and such commodities without being guilty of fraud upon the purchaser, In the Austrian army suicides average over 10,000 a year. This does not include foiled attempts, and it represents 20 per cent, of the general mortality among the Austrian soldiers. Steeple pointed caps, sometimes four feet in higfit, came into fashion in Italy and France in 1483. They fitted the head, ran to a sharp point, above, and at the end the veil was fastened. The auger that bores a square hole consists of a screw auger in a square • tube, the corners of which are sharp- : ened from within, and as the auger advances cut the round hole square. Between the two wings of the castle of Synonetta, two miles from Milan, the report of a pistol shot is • repeated sixty times. At the same place a single musical instrument produces the effect ot a fullorchestra. The more the brain works the wqrse the teeth—that is the last word of physiological chemistry. And «he physical injuries due to loss o- decay of the teeth are greater than au? likely’ to be inflicted by the j advent of an epidemic. ! The Roman soldiers, who built such wonderful roads and carried a weight of armor and luggage that would crush the average farm hand, lived on coarse brown bread and sour wine. They were ’temperate in diet gnd regular and constant in exercise. Inigo county. California, has a wonderful natural curiosity which closely resembles a monster petrified I elephant. The rock which nature has given such an extraordinary form is a dark gray granite, almost the exact color of the Asiatic elephant's i skin. A boy not yet out of his teens, just entering upon them, in fact, has been sentenced at Coblencc, Germany, to twelve years’ imprisonment at hard labor. He was convicted of setting sixteen incendiary fires, causing a direct pecuniary lo »s of $50,000. The great high bridge of the Southern Pacific railroad, over Pecos canyon, is remarkable for three things,. It is the highest bridge in the country, being 323 feet above the river bed;it was constructed in six months, and only one man was killed in the course of its erection. Dr. Chaunbey, president of Bates College, illustrates the progress of c<» education by telling a storv of how a man in 1865, on being asked how many students were attending the college, answered. “Forty-three students, and a nigger, and a woman," ond adds: “Now there are 1 forty women in the classes."