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Evening Star, Issue 3280, 25 August 1873, Page 2

At th§ Port Chalmers Police Court to-day, before Captain Thomson and Dr Drysdale, Thomas King, on remand, was brought up on a charge of manslaughter. After the evidence of John Smith and James Jennings was taken, the prisoner was fully committed to take hia trial, bail being accepted. The body of Kobert Mair has not been recovered.

Of Mr James Smith’s new apostleship, the Melbourne correspondent of the Hamilton Spectator writes :— “By the way, it may be mentioned as curious that one of his latest

converts and most sincere followers is Mr Weston, the Wizard Oil Prince! Good follow, Frank, and clever; but I thought him much too’cute to fall into Mr Smith’s ways, unless, indeed, he sees ‘ plunder,’ in it, from the showman’s point of view.”

Fox, the pedestrian, who defeated Drake recently in Dunedin, proceeded to Christchurch yesterday in the Beautiful Star, to arrange a match with Harris, late of Victoria. So far as we have heard, the distances to bo run will be 12 >, 440, and BSO yards—ail over hurdles. Young Austin has undertaken the task of training Fox. It is anticipated the event will come off in about a month.

A woman named Ellen Buckley, tbe wife of a laborer, died very suddenly on Saturday afternoon. "While sewing, her son observed her fall from her chair, ami on Dr Bohrdt being called in a short time afterwards, he pronounced life to be extinct. She has been an out-door patient at the Hospital for some time past, having been treated for heart disease, from the effects of which it is sup posed she died. She leaves five children. Warden Fitzgerald appears to be a man of original ideas. In his half-yearly report of the Kanieri district, he suggests that premiums should be offered, prior to the undertaking future roads or tracks, for the best blazed route from point to point, with a speckled limit of grade, and with only fair windings, as by that means the knowledge men have obtained in prospecting or cattle hunting might be procured at a cheap rate. He also suggests the formation of a company to construct a railway from the Glacier to Okarito, and asks whether that railway could not be presented with so reasonable a prospect of being remunerative, that capitalists might be induced to construct it. A continuous inter st would, he says, be obtained by the shipment of ice, without regard to the traffic of freight and pa-seugera. The Hokitika tilar says, referring to the rep>rt’‘The ex'port of ice would be a new industry, though we have no doubt that some day it will be an established one, and the Australian Colonies will always afford a ready market. The report concludes by recommending that increased facilities should be offered to miners to take up small freeholds, and states that, if these were given, a large population would settle down.”

The following startling piece of Parliamentary intelligence is from the New Zealand Herald I think I may tell you that, after the tariff question is disposed of, something which will he viewed, for the time at least, as even of more interest, if not of more importance, will be brought before the Assembly. What I allude to means nothing less than the severation of the two islands, each of which is to have 9 distinct Legislature of its own. How such a radical change wall be brought about, your deponent sayeth not; but J beiieve the whole thing is nicely arranged—cut and dried in fact, ready to be, introduced when the proper time comes. You may rely, I think, upon this statement being based upon facts. Wellington is to go into ibe shade. The conditions arc stated to be in the rough, something as follows certain of the .North Island members—indeed, the large proportion of them—will unite with the .Southern representatives, for tbe purpose of moving and supporting a series of resolutions, which is to effect a complete insular separation between the two islands. The details are not perfected, bnt the allocation of the Colonial and Provincial indebtedness is said to bo settled. Dunedin is fixed •is the seat of tho Central Government of the South Island, ami your City for the North Island {Auckland). Thelocaleof theseatsof the two Governments will comprise one of the motions which is to initiate and bring about the proposed change. 1 think there is not tho slightest doubt but what the attempt will be made, and that it will be carried by a majority when the day and the hour arrives calling for a division. In the Legislative Council on the 12th instant, the Hon. Captain Fraser, in moving that it was expedient to appoint an Inspector of Lunatic Asylums, argued that the Lunatics Act was a failure, and that its machinery was capable of being put in motion so as to endanger the liberty of the subject. In proof of the latter assertion, he gave an instance which had come under his notice “ On a very recent occasion he heard acci dentally that a person named James Christie, a resident in Otago, and a large landed proprietor, but of rather eccentric habits, had been taken to the lunatic asylum oh the previous evening. He had heard something before which had aroused his suspicions, and he went to the inspector of Police, who told him that the man had been brought in in the afternoon in a high state of excitement by a next door neighbor, that he had summoned two Magistrates to the Mayor’s Court —me of them was a recent invention of tbe Minister of Justice, a grocer, and the other was a person named Black, who xvaa totally unknown to him. Those two Solons called in two medical men, whose names he had never heard before, who signed a certificate and sent the unfortunate man to the lunatic asylum as a dangerous lunatic. He took the Inspector of Police with him at once to the asylum, and called for the supposed lunatic, who in the meantime had gone through the usual process of initiation, and examined him for half an hour. The result was that himself, the Inspiclorof Police, and the Superintendent of the Asylum were quite satisfied that the man was perfectly sane. It then occurred to him to send for his Honor the Superintendent, who had known the man for twentv years. Mr Macanclrew arrived, and, after a brief examination, said the man was the same as he had always been, and appointed a Commission, consisting of three of the principal men in Otago, to make an examination, which they did, and declared the man to bo sane. Now, had it had not been for the mere accident of his being aware that a certain quarrel had taken place between the man and his wife, he would have been confined for bis life in the asylum, for they all knew that'a man Wrongfully confined in a lunatic asylum was almost certain to; become insane in time. He hoped that the Hon. the Colonial Secretary would take notice of the case he had referred to, and see that for the future no lunatic, or suspected lunatic, should be brought into the Mayor’s Court, and injustice thereby be done. They should be taken to the Resident Magistrate’s Court, where medical gentlemen of reputation and intelligence wpuld lie called in.”

The jisqal fortipghtly meeting of the Dunedin Mutual improvement Society will be held to-to-morrow (Tuesday) evening,’ at eight q’clock.