MULTUM IN PARVO.

Otago Witness, Issue 1778, 19 December 1885, Page 6

MULTUM IN PARVO.

— A sensational story is published in New York of the matrimonial experience of Mrs Samantha Goodie, who recently married her son without knowing it. Upon discovering their mistake, they fled in opposite directions. The bridegroom is Harrison Turner, who amassed a fortune in California.

— No devotee of tobacco, saysDr Dio Lewis, has graduated at the head of his class, at Harvard, or any other college where statistics have been preserved, notwithstanding the fact that a large majority of college students are smokers. — A nion&ter cannon of unusual power is now nearly completed at the famous English works of Sir William Armstrong. The belief is that when put to the test it will carry a shell of a ton weight. 14 or 15 miles.

— A post-mortem examination of a man who died recently at a fairly advanced age in London showed what power of adaptation the human franio possesses. His heart was found on his right side, and he had only one very large lung, filling almost, the. usual space of the two lungs ; the other was represented by a little shrivelled mass oE tissue.

— An English farmer, who had 200 acres in wheat, figures that it cost him £5 an acre, and that he received only .64 an acre for it, a loss of nearly £2000. — The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland lodged £3000 in the Munster Bank a few days before it failed.

— It is reported that the commander of a Portuguese gun-boat had arranged to buy 1200 slaves from the King of: Dahomey to work on the coffee plantations at St Thomas, an island in the Gulf of Guinea, belonging to Portugal. — Fifteen hundred orchids, the lifetime collection of Mrs Marj D. Morgan, of New York, were sold the other day, and failed to realise anything like their original cost, some 200,000d01. One splendid little plant was bid up to 950d01. — One of the large English war vessels, the Resistance, is to be coated with indiarubber to a considerable thickness to see how that material will repel projectiles. — The average income of the 509 Lords of England is over £24,000 each. Their gross income is about £15,000,000.

— The Russian Government grants subsidies amounting to £15'd,55',i tovarioussteamshipcompanies. — A French gentleman has offered to marry Jeanne Lorette, the young Belgian who murdered the Japanese Consul at Rotterdam.

— Some young woman in Pueblo, 'Mex., have started a paper called the Mother-in-Law. Its spicy paragraphs are called broom-sticks.

— A few days ago, at a ball in Basle, Switzerland, a young girl fell in a faint anddied afew minutes after. Cause — a tightly-laced corset.

— Every child in Bohemia must study music, and in this lies the secret of the natural talent for music in that country.

— Another religious army appears in England, called the Church Army, and made up of the communicants of tho Church of England. It has the cordial support of leading Bishops, and white not intending to rival the Salvationists, it hopes by adopting somewhat similar methods to do effective work among the abandoned classes. It aims especially to use working-men as evangelists, of whom it has already enrolled abou f 5000.

— The United States makes a million sewing machines yearly, which can do as much work as formerly required 12,000,000 women working by hand. A single shoe factory in Massachusetts turns out as many pairs of boots as 30,000 bootmakers in Paris.

— The prominent sheep-raisers in Tennessee have resolved to abandon the business, owing to the want of a dog law, asserting that 300,000 sheep cannot be maintained against 500,000 dogs.

— Lord Monk Briton has just opened the Circus street TBoard School at Brighton, which hns just been erected at a cost of about £9000. Th. Q pehnol is to accomodate the vex*y poorest class in the town, and the fee will be one penny pa week. — L-.'i'y Dufferin's fund for providing medical aid for the women of India is making rapid progress.

— It seems curious that there is not a wax match manufactory in the United States, but so it is. All those that are now used are imported from England, France, and Italy.

— The wife of a police sergeant in New Orleans made an attack upon a young woman of whom she was jealous, and was thereupon arrested by her husband and locked up in gaol. Ho released her after three or four hours, and was dismissed from the force in consequence.

— The Sultan of Morocco has ceded to France the oasis of Figuig, which was formerly independent territory, although a tributary of Morocco.

— The most intimate friends of the exPremier do not hesitate to say that they believe that although he may succeed under favourable circumstances in delivering a few short speeches this autumn, Mr Gladstone's career as an orator is practically closed. Miss St. Pierre, of Tennessee, who is a Diana in the chase and a philanthropist in her plans, has real estate iron foundries and coa mines valued at £400,000. 1

— Russia, with a population of about 100,000,000, has 85 bishops, 100,058 clergymen, 27,000 monks and nuns, and 41,000 churches. — According, to the last report of the Commissioner of Education there are 5000 students iv the theological schools of the United States., In these schools 35 different denominations are represented. The churches haying the largest number of students are the following : Catholic, 1000; Baptist, 899; Presbyterian, 629; Lutheran, 525; Methodist, 451; Episcopalian, 253 ; Christian, 115. — Lenbach, the Munich artist, is painting a portrait of Prince Bismarck for Lord Rosebery. He has made several portraits of the Prince before this, but has never had a regular " sitting." He visits Varzin as Bismarck's personal friend, talks and walks and dines with him, and then paints him from memory. — It is not the druggisi jvho is always responsible for the fatal mistakes in prescriptions. A Philadelphia member of the craft' has 44 prescriptions, received in six months, every one ol which contains such errors as seriously to meuace life, in case they had been filled as the doctors wr.ote them.

— There wst. aever a time in the publishing business, says an expert, jyhen proffers of manuscript from women were so numerous. Society belles seem to have all at once caught ,the fever of authorship. As some houses will' publish almost anything in which the profit is assured, but nothing from untried pens without a guarantee, they can usually give a definite answer to an applicant without first reading the copy. — A manufacturer in Breslau has recently built at his factory a chimney over SO feet in hejght entirely of paper. The blocks used in its construction, instead of being brick' or stone, were made q? layers of, compressed paper jointed with a silicious .cement. The advantages are the fire-proof nature of the material, the minimum of danger from lightning, and grea^t'elasticity.

— Hungary water is, or was recently, on sale in London. It is said to take its name from a queen of Hungary, for whose use it was first made, and to be of singular value as a strengthener of the memory. We have understood that, it is made of rosemary flowers infused in f.n . of wine. — Athenaeum.

— All the Wesleyan Methodist ministers in London, it is said, vacated their pulpits on a late Sunday in order that the local preachers might have an opportnnity to address the congregations. The number of laymen who discoursed is estimated at not less than 275.

— There are about 14,000 licensed cabdrivers in London. It is estimated that there are on an average 100,000 fares daily.

—Of the 850,000 people in Eastern Roumelia, 573,560 are Bulgarians and 174,700 Turks. — Solid bodies shine in the dark, or become luminous, when heated from 600 degrees to 700 degrees F., and in daylight only when they reach a temperate of 1000 degrees.

— A disproportionate tax on foreigners residing in France is a new and popular proposition. —A medical authority gives the time taken by the blood of a dog in making the entire circuit of the body as 17£ seconds, during which the heart makes 51£ pulsations. — There is hardly a village in Russia in which there is not to be found a bottle of water from the river Jordan.

— The general average of the human pulse, though the exceptions are very numerous, may be put at birth at 140; two years, 100; from 16 to 19, 80; at manhood, 76 ; and old age, 60. — Recently the cabmen of London drove their empty vehicles in the funeral procession of a popular comrade two abreast to the extent of a mile and a half.

—Out of 942 deaths in pits in 1884, there were 65 caused by explosions of fire-damp, and 482 caused by the falls of roofs and sides of the workings ; 100 were killed by trams and tubs, and 40 were killed by accidents on inclined planes.

— Four London churches, with combined seating accommodations for 1800 people, report an aggregate membership of 220 persons, and of these 88 are officials.

— A coloured washerwoman at Albany, Ga., boasts two twin daughters called by the surprising names of Mary Magdalene and Virgin Mary. Other helpless twins at Bldora, la., rejoice in the names of Gasoline and Kerosene.

— A Dundee bailie, named Hunter, recently sentenced a starving laborer to 40 days' hnprisonment for stealing three apples. — More than a hundred peerages have become extinct since Queen Victoria ascended the Throne, including Cornwall, Egremont, Thanet, Dorset, Melbourne, Lyndhurst, Plymouth, Macaulay, Palmerston, and Beaconsfield.

— Cats have been known to bring in, not only young weasels, but also full-grown ones, and a curious anecdote is related to the effect that an adult weasel thus caught was observed to make its escape by feigning death when dropped, apparently dead, by the cat. Both weasels and stoats swim weli. A weasel has been seen to cross a stream with its prey, and a stoat to do the same thing when in pursuit of its prey. A stoat has also been observed to dive, and to lead its young to a stream and cross with it.

— In Newport slang a misfit wife is one who has found herself bo mismated that she has had to part with her husband. They no longer speak of grass widows or divorced persons, but always of misfits.

— At Liskheard, Cornwall, a man has made for himself a hat, coat, trousers, cape, and shoes of ratskins. The number of rats required to make the suit was 670.

There are 500,000 Europeans colonised in Algeria, of whom 350,000 are French.

— Lord Palmerston once remarked that the drawbacks and objections to war are somewhat mitigated by the fact that it teaches geography to persons who otherwise would never learn it.

— The manufacture of solid carbonic acid gas has been carried on for some time in Berlin. It comes in small cylinders, and if kept under pressure will last some time. A cylinder one and a-half inch in diameter and two inches long will take five hours to melt away into gas.