BRIEF MENTION.

Evening Star, Issue 9834, 24 October 1895, Page 2

BRIEF MENTION.

la Melbourne the wages now offered for domestics run as low as 3s a week. Marvellous Melbourne !

It is proposed to take steps to form a union in the interests of the domestic servants of Wellington.

This is the age of over-emphasis. We are thought half-hearted and insincere if we do not shout, and stamp, and scream, and tear our passion to tatters, whether it concerns pictures or novelß, men or cities.— 'Spectator.' Dr Syme, of Melbourne Hospital, on the curious and anomalous laws of human heredity:—•" It is apparently more common for qualities to bo transmitted from the female, and especially to the male offspring; while it is also common for qualities to be transmitted from the male parent to the female offspring. So that if this rule held good for two generations the males would resemble their maternal grandfather and the females their paternal grandmother. Of course in very many cases the transmission is from male parents to male offspring; but the first rule is certainly very common, and helps to explain why genius heed not be hereditary, and why the :Bons of great men so seldom attain distinction." The arithmetician who has been investigating the indemnity to be paid by China says that the country will have to pay to Japan money at the average rate of more than £l3 a minute, day and night, during the next five years.

The oldest New South Wales pensioner of any grade is the perennial F. L. S. Merewether, ox-clerk of the Executive Council, who since January 6, 1856, has annually drawn £9OO. Forty years on 6th January next, at £9OO a year, is just £36,000. About the shortest Act on record was that reducing the salary of the S.A. Governor to £4,000. It read: "The Governor's Salary, Act, 1866, is hereby repealed." "Is there any necessity for me to live with the woman ?" asked a wife-beater of Mr Keogh, P.M., at Fitzroy, the other morning. " Not for the ensuing quarter, at any rate," promptly replied Mr Keogh, as he gave him three months' hard. W. R. Wilson, of Broken Hill, who has returned from another visit to Hannan's (Coolgardie), says that if the formations there go down for another 100 ft, and continue as rich as at present, the field will astonish the world. Two men have been working a cement claim, and have dollied l,loooz of gold. Their claim was only 50ft by 50ft. It is Bro. Menzies Caddie who is appointed Levite to the Primrose Tent, Rechabites.

Captain Streeter, of the ship Euterpe, arrived by the steamer Pakeha to settle in Auckland.

Negotiations are practically completed for the purchase of certain Auckland breweries by English capitalists. As a means of showing how far the world is from being over-populated, economists assert that the entire population of the United States could live comfortably in the single State of Texas. ]■' It was William Power, and not John Towers, who was one o£ the defendants in the ?,tone-throwing oase at the Police Court yesterday.