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Show Scraps. The czar rules over 160,000,000 people. Turkey's population is estimated at 41,000,000. Income tax is paid on King Edward's private estates. The captain of a ship in the British navy has his meals alone. In some parts of England there are cookery schools for boys. A ferry bridge with a span of twelve hundred feet is to be built at Bordeaux, I France. The electric railway up Mont Blanc is now open to the public as far as the Col de Voza, 5,495 feet high. The Daughters of the Confederacy in Tennessee have offered a prize for the best essay on international peace. In one year the number of taxicabs in London has more than doubled, and the horse-drawn cab will probably soon be extinct. Most of the cookings of the Japanese cities is done in public ovens, which are maintained at convenient places at moderate mod-erate cost to patrons. A botanist in Chile has found a plant on the mountains and tablelands which yields a good quality of rubber. It is claimed as a special advantage that ex- tracting the sap does not Injure the I plant. "Where a man sells a farm in the Si United States to invest his money in Mexico with the expectation of better- lng his circumstances he is almost cer- I, tainly doomed to failure," writes Consul W. W. Canada from Vera Cruz. p Miss Lillian Close, who last year won $ the beauty prize offered by the Daily g Mirror, is said to be the most photo- f, graphed woman in England. Her pic- i tures are on sale in hundreds of shops, e and the demand is still so great for new & ones that she spends an hour every day fe posing before the camera. K Asbestos houses are much used in Australia, says Popular Mechanics. It f! is stated that they are not only fireproof, I-but I-but impervious to water, unaffected by heat or cold, and of high insulating properties. Still another favorable fea- i; ture is the fact that it is not attacked k by white ants or other insects that si abound in southern countries. 63 A dressmaking establishment in Bos-ton Bos-ton almost entirely operated by electricity elec-tricity has an electric cutter capable of cutting out 250 thicknesses of cloth at once, a button sewing machine which puts on three thousand buttons a day, a buttonhole machine ma nikfogur hundred hun-dred an hour, sleev sewers, tucking machines, ma-chines, waist and skirt machines making mak-ing 1,800 to 3,500 stitches a minute. During the last twenty years the lakes of Russian Central Asia have shown a steady rise of water level, in the entire region Detween tne iortietn parallel ana the trans-Siberian railway, and from the Caucasus to Chinese Turkestan. Within this period, or since 1885, the Sea of Aral has risen about six and a half feet. The phenomenon has accompanied accom-panied a perior of augmentation of rainfall, rain-fall, and J. de Schokalsky thinks that it has now attained its maximum. Maurice Hewlett, the English author, is a warm advocate of peace. He set forth his views in a letter read at the annual meeting of the International Arbitration Ar-bitration Peace association not long ago. "I am, as you suppose, a peace-at-any-price man," he wrote. "The use of murder mur-der and homicide as a means of deciding international difficulties seems to me inconceivable. in-conceivable. I do not, however, believe that we shall maye any real advance until war is commonly spoken of in the terms we now apply to drunkenness or gluttony, as degrading and disgusting." Visitors to the Bronx botanical garder may now have the unusual experience oi seeing a large species of agave in bloom The plant is in the court of the public conservatories, Range 1, and forms pari of the collection of American desen plants installed there during the summer. sum-mer. It is at present the most conspicuous conspicu-ous object in this collection. From the surface of the ground to the apex of the brown flowering stem, which has a basal ba-sal diameter of about two and a hall inches, it is nineteen feet two inches tall, about one-quarter of this length being occupied by the inflorenscence. New York Botanical Garden Journal. John D. Rockefeller, jr., is known best by his religious activities, but he has received re-ceived strenuous business training. While at Brown university he successfully success-fully managed the funds of the varsity team. After graduating he entered, the offices of the Standard Oil company, where he toiled over the books like any other clerk. He has the management of the great $43,000,000 Rockefeller educational edu-cational fund. He is just past 30, but is vice president of the great oil trust., a member of the boards of directors of the Lackawanna railroad and of the American Ameri-can Linseed trust. He also represents the Rockefeller interests in the United States Steel corporation. A few miles south of Fredericksburg, Va near Guinea station, on the Richmond, Rich-mond, Fredericksburg & Potomac railroad, rail-road, is the house in which Stonewall Jackson, the famous Confederate general, gen-eral, died, on May 10. 1863. It is interesting inter-esting to learn that this property is to be preserved as one of the historic landmarks land-marks of the Confederacy. It has been purchased by the president of the Rich mond, Fredericksburg & Potomac railroad, rail-road, who, it is reported, will transfer it to the company, which will convert the grounds about the building into a park. Stonewall Jackson died a few days after his brilliant flank movement on Hooker's army at Chancellorsvllle furnished new evidence of his genius for war. Baltimore Sun. Stella Josephine Feller of Harris county, coun-ty, Texas, earned $150,000 in a single afternoon by marking down two oil wells. She has been so successful In discovering oil that she has almost daily offers of tens of thousands of dollars in fees for special work. The $150,000 fee was paid by ten men, who owned a small tract and had failed to strike oil They offered Miss tFeller the $150,000 if she would discover two productive wells, and she selected two spots after a few' hours of surveying. Pipes were sunk, and in each case a gusher was struck. Miss Feller also has been remarkably successful in discovering sulphur beds. She has made a fortune in oil wells of her own and in fees, and now is expending ex-pending $500,000 on an orphan asylum in Beaumont. Curious experiences occasionally come to administrators of even so prosaic a department as the customs. A Sydney correspondent tells of one which recently befell N. Colston Lockyer, the federal assistan controller general. Above the mantelpiece in his office is nailed a sun-dried sun-dried lizard. It had been imported by an enterprising Chinese merchant, who desired Mr. Lockyer to take particular particu-lar note of it and instruct his officers as to its nature and the amount of duty chargeable on similar consignments in bulk. The Chinese explained that dried lizard was a very importan item in the pharmacopaeia of the Celestial empire, and when ground to powder possessed medcinal properties of untold value. The officers of the department were at a loss to know how to classify the article, their choice apparently lying between drug, preserved food and prohibited vermin. Mr. Lockyer cut the Gordian knot by classifying the "medicine lizard" as "unenumerated" and admitting it duty free. London Standard. |
