Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 April 1894 — PEOPLE. [ARTICLE]

PEOPLE.

Prof. Ernst Hackel, the “German Darwin,” is 60 years of age and has been*connected with the University of Jena thirty-three years. Donald Murry, a newspaper man of Sydney, New South Wales, has invented and patented a device by means of which an operator in York, with a keyboard in front of him like an ordinary typewriter, can not only produce type-written copy in New Orleans, but is claimed can operate a type-setting machine here and deliver his matter thus in lead, ready for the forms. Not only that, but the same operator, by using a number of telegraph lines, can set up the same copy simultaneously in a dozen places. Major William Downie, one of the most noted pioneers of ’49, died at San Francisco Harbor a few days ago under singularly pathetic circumstances. One of the features of the Midwinter Fair is a ’49 mining camp, in which are the identical cabins in which lived some of the most famous miners, now mostly millionaires, of those davs. such as Mackay, Flood, and O’Brien. Major Downie’s cabin is prominent in the camp, and he was on his way from Victoria, B. C., on the steamer City df Pueblo to occupy it during a portion of the time that the Fair is to be open. A committee went aboard to welcome the old miner, and while they were telling him of the grand old times that awaited him, and he was ecstatic over the prospect of again meeting his old partners of pioneer times, an attack of heart failure, undoubtedly brought on by emotion, came on and he fell over on the deek dead.