NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9166, 22 September 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

1 A French Laundry man cleans linen with' ' out soap by rubbing it with boiled potatoes. I Charles Villiers has been a member ol s every British Parliament fqr fifty-three I years. j Chicago divorces are now furnished by the gross. There were 144 of them last | month. j Berlin is to have next year an exhibition ! devoted to appliances for preventing accidents. | Last month New York's police magisi trates committed 4G67 children to charii table institutions. j There are 30,000 Jews in London. The I Jewish colony was first established in that ; city 250 years aero. I A quarrel over a partner for a danced at ' Prairie Centre, 111., the other day, resulted I in a free tight, in which eight men were I either shot or stabbed. ! London now has several lines of half- ! penny 'buses, which connect with the ! various horse-car lines.

i At the inquest neia on the murderer Jackson it was stated that he gained 31b in I weight since his committal. j It is expected that railway communica- | tion between .Vienna and Constantinople will be opened within a few days. j Gold quartz has been discovered on the I property of Vaynol, near Bangor, owned by ! J\lr. Assheton Smith. The yield of metal ; ! has proved to be 16dwt. to the ton. ! I The President of the French Agricultural ' Society estimates the damage to the crops L in France by bad weather at 500,000,000 • francs. Krupp's works have begun the production • of aluminium according to the Ketto sye- ' tem. It can be produced for twelve marks !■ a kilogramme. _ Paris has thirty miles of pipe for carrying 3 1 compressed air for power. The engines art 1 ?f>f\ lint'iP.iiAU'fi- anrl tliA r»nnl pf»n.snmnfinri

fifty tons daily. An order to an encampment- of British volunteers is, " all hair to be cub quite short, and where possible the moustache only is to be worn." A labourer, named Charles Welfare, aged 33 years, has died at Northfieet, of hydrophobia, after terrible suffering, the result of a bite from a cat a few weeks ago. It is stated that the new magazine rifie for the British Army has been found inefficient, and, as far as the present model is concerned, withdrawn by the War Office. The marriage of Lord Beaumont with Miss Isaacson, daughter of Mdme Elise, was solemnised in the presence of a large congregation at the Oratory, at Brompton. One of Disraeli's favourite peacocks has recently died, and Ralph [Disraeli has had the tail feathers made into a fire screen and has given it to the Queen, much to her gratification. How is intellect divided in the United Kingdom ? Dr. Conan Doyle has discovered hat one in 31,000 Englishmen, one in 22,000 Scotchmen, and one in 49,000 Irishmen rise do distinction.

The Duchess of Buccleuch, on behalf of the women of Great Britain and Ireland, has presented the Queen with a diamond and pearl necklace and earrings as a Jubilee present. Captain Hodge, of the 12th Hussars, blew out his brains with a pistol while staying at) an inn at Dartmoor, where he was every evening visited by a married lady for whom he had formed an attachment. The celebrated Devil's Bridge at Andermatt, Switzerland, which spans the Reuss

at a great height, fell in a few days ago. The bridge was erected in 1830, and was a single arch of granite, of 26 feet span. An Imperial order has been issued at Berlin, commanding that the Garde du Corps and all the Cuirassier regiments of the army shall, from October 1, be provided with lances and be exercised in their use. Miss Kennedy, an actress who recently took a leading part in Chamberlain's Irish Combination Company, committed suicide in a police cell at Warrington recently, whilst under detention on a charge oi theft. Mrs. Jane Cakebread, an elderly lady, who has been chargod with drunkenness 209 times at police courts in North London, was allowed by the Dalston police magistrate to go to her home in Hertfordshire, after being remanded on a similar charge. At Birmingham Police Court, Mr. Jelf, s well-known solicitor, who recently failed for upwards of £30,000, surrendered tc undergo a term of two months' imprisonment, in default of paying £350 that he had been entrusted with by a lodge cf Oddfellows. The German Jews gratefully cherish the memory of the Emperor Frederick. His name has been coined into Hebrew, and a suggestion has been made that all Jewish male children born from now until the first anniversary of the Kaiser's death should be given the appellation. Three men were lately found lying helpless in one of the low courts of Newport, and were removed to the infirmary. It has transpired that three jars of spirits were stolen from the athletic club, and the men are supposed to have indulged in a debauch. One of them subsequently died from alcoholic poisoning. The Romanist Total Abstinence Union of America includes 22 subordinate unions, 754 societies, and a membership of over 50,000. Each member is pledged to abstain from all intoxicants for a stated time ; second, to discourage the use of intoxicants ; third, to do all that is possible to destroy the vice of drunkenness. A Roman amphitheatre has been discovered in a cornfield at Deutsch Altenburg, on the Danube. The state of part of the crop indicated a stony subsoil in the form of a circle, and excavations were made, which brought to light the uppermost gallery of an amphitheatre. The perfectlypreserved pavement of a Roman road was unearthed in the vicinity. At Cardiff a coroner's jury returned a verdict of "wilful murder" against two ladies named Wilson and Rees, the latter the daughter of a physician, who had been • charged with a like offence, for performing ; an unlawful operation, which resulted in the death of a Mrs. Williams, the wife of a. gentleman whose father is a clergyman of the Church of England. A man named Black made an attempt) recently to shoot the Niagara rapids in a boat of his own invention. Shortly after starting the boat capsized, and was then turned over and over by the force of the rushing water. When last seen, the crafts was being whirled round a whirlpoolNothing was seen of Black from the I moment his boat capsized, and there can be no doubt but that he was drowned. A correspondent of a London paper writes : —" On Friday night a young gentleman, playing billiards at a public-house in Bromley, made a bet that he would get one of the balls into his mouth. He did get ib in; and there it stuck, in spite of all his efforts to dislodge it. The surgeon called in was more successful. He extracted the lump of ivory, but only after extracting several of the experimentalist's fronts

' ivories. In the Chancery division, recently, in Arnison and others v. Smith and others, the plaintiffs claimed damages for misrepresentations in a prospectus which had induced them to purchase debenture stock in the Genoa Waterworks Company ; and after hearing the case, Mr. Justice Kekewich made an order with costs in favour of the 41 plaintiffs who appeared. As to 12 whc 1 " 'he

bad not appeared, dismissed their actions with costs. The large towns of England are very deadly to child-life. Within a year of birth they destroy on an average 185 of every 1000 born. If we take individual towns, the sacrifice is still more dreadful. For example, in Liverpool it is 219 out of every 1000 born, and in Leicester it sometimes rises as high a 5245 ; that is to say, one of every four of the unhappy babies of Leicester is buried within twelve months of its birth. A boy, eight, years old, named Alphonse Siauzade, the son of a widow residing in the Rue de Bercy, Paris, through jealousy, attempted to kill his little brother Louis, aged six, by cutting his stomach open with a razor which he had taken to bed with him for the purpose. The child murderer :ohen went into a corner of the room, and cut his own threat with a razor, dying in a few moments. He had twice previously attempted to kill his brother. At the Pan-Presbyter'an Conference the limitation of the singing to the metrical version of the Psalms and the exclusion c" instrumental music was hardly defensible, and gave a certain aspect of narrow provincialism to the meetings. If this limitation is preserved in it may be hoped than an effort will be made to sing the Psalms properly. In I)r. Banna's church in ■; Belfast at the last Council his was admirably done. In London the singing was like the music of owls and bitterns.