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Show BITS OF INFORMATION. The average wage of the working woman is $272.04 a year. There are more than 600 women studying medicine at the French universities. uni-versities. A town in north Prussia has decreed that any woman who promenades the streets in a trailing skirt will be fined $7.50. . The rate of - divorce in this country is twice that of Switzerland, thrice that of France, and five times that of Germany. Ger-many. During the twenty years from 1870 to 1S90 divorce in the United States Increased In-creased about three times as fast as the population. During the last seventeen years American Amer-ican coal mines have killed 22,840 men, made at least 10,000 widows, and upward up-ward of 40,000 orphans. Of the 20,000 women who have qualified quali-fied for the law in the United States, less than forty have become advocates in the federal supreme court. An effort is being made to bring Irish agriculture more up to date by introducing intro-ducing modern machinery. There are public demonstrations throughout the country. Canton, China, merchants at home and abroad have formed a navigation association with $4,000,000 capital, to run steamers, open a bank and an insurance insur-ance company. While 60,000 volts was considered a maximum tension for transmission lines a few years ago, they are now using 72,000. An SO.OOO-volt line thirteen and one-half miles long is now building, and a line has been built designed for 100,000 volts. Africa produces the world's supply of ivory. Its elephants are mammoths, different in shape from India's tuskless behemoth, and with ancestors which are found and preserved in Artie ice, prehistorically true to today's African type. The Indian animal has never been quite ythe same structurally, has never grown tusks worthy of the name, and is a plain beast of burden, more valuable alive than dead. Worcester, Mass., has under consideration consider-ation an ordinance against whistling. One of the features of It is that if a man thinks he can't get along without making mak-ing alleged music he can indulge himself him-self by taking out a license. The Boston Bos-ton Journal, jeering at the proposed enactment, says that a tax for sidewalk conversation will be the next on the list. It also suggests a fine for all persons per-sons who do not wear rubber heels. Professor David W. Marks, who died in London recently, was probably the only Jewish minister who held a place with the same congregation for sixty-nine sixty-nine years. He was 97 years old, but was a member of the "younger class," having been the first clergyman of his faith to cast aside, in an English congregation, con-gregation, some of the antique usages and to make the service of the reformed re-formed kind. He was recognized as one of the learned men of his time, but was not a university graduate. To illustrate the twentieth century child's ignorance of old-time methods and to show that as she designated it there is nothing new or wonderful in the electric light-automobile-phonograph era for the youngster of today, a mother told this story: "A piano tuner was busy putting our instrument into condition, when our little 5-year-old son rushed into my room, with wonder stamped on his face and exclaimed: 'Mother! think of it! there is a man in the parlor playing on the piano with his hands.' " The youngster had been accustomed ac-customed all his life to mechanical mu-?ic mu-?ic makers. The coal fields of Columbia are well placed to take advantage of the markets which will be made available by the Panama canal. At present they are imperfectly im-perfectly and crudely " worked and the means of transport are inadequate. Both these drawbacks can be remedied. There are twelve short railways, none of them over seventy miles long, all planned without regard to coal export, although several of them traverse coal fields. The navigable rivers are suitable only for vessels of light draft. The lower Mag-dalena Mag-dalena is navigable for about 600miles, and the upper river at times for about 100 miles. The coal fields are quite numerous. nu-merous. Governor Stuart of Pennsylvania has vetoed a bill to permit juries in murder cases to determine between the death penalty and life imprisonment. "In view of the disregard of human life which some elements of our population continually contin-ually exhibit. I do not think that our criminal law governing the punishment for murder in the first degree should be relayed," says the governor. Approving the veto, the Philadelphia Inquirer says: "When we reach the point where juries, swayed momentarily by emotion or by sympathy, can virtually destroy the death penalty we shall arrive at the beginning of an increasing list of coldblooded cold-blooded crimes." In England it is rare, if ever, that the death of a Jew is regarded as due to alcoholism. In New York where the number of the Hebrew population of Russian origin is considerable, the deaths returned from alcoholism in one year, according to the British Medical Journal, formed 0.42 per cent of the total deaths, while among those who were children of Russian or Polish mothers the percentages from the same cause was only 0.13. The same proportion propor-tion represents the ratio of cases of alcoholism al-coholism and disease directly due to it among total cases admitted into the chief Jewish hospital in New York, whereas In Boston city hospital cases of alcoholism formed 3 per cent of the total. New York Tribune. A new portrait of Spinoza discovered by Ernst Altkirch of Munich has been pronounced genuine by Constantin Brunner, who thinks it was made in 1600. It shows the philosoDher in the prime of life, with black, curly hair and black mustache. "It was made." it is contended, "before the dreadful malady, mala-dy, pulmonary consumption, had changed his appearance. It is known that his abundant hair fell out at that time and that he became quite bald. For that reason the bushy black mane with which he is shown in so many pictures was only a wig, worn in keeping keep-ing with the fashion of the day. The new portrait will serve, as a correct foundation for a picture of the philosopher, philoso-pher, to take the place of the imaginary imag-inary ones with which the world thus far has contented itself." |