DE OMNIBUS REBUS.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 247, 25 March 1875, Page 3

DE OMNIBUS REBUS.

The Athenaeum announces that an official history of the Ashantee Campaign will be published. It is not yet finally determined to whom the task shall be confided, but it will probably be entrusted to two wellknown officers who distinguished themselves in the war. The following strange story appears in the Home News:—" An officer of the First Empire, aged seventy-eight, who has for forty years been living on the modest pension of 800 francs a year, having been compelled the other day to enter the Hospital Necker, was discovered to be a lady. Her name is De Sankeisen, and the secret being out, she readily related her history. Her grandfather, the Baron von Sankeisen, commanded a corps d'amiie in the Bavarian army, Bavaria being then in alliance with France. She was fourteen years old when her father, Colonel Von Sankeisen, died, and her grandfather, for some inexplicable caprice, compelled her to enter one of the regiments of his division; she served in Germany and in Spain, and at Waterloo received two somewhat severe wounds. She became afterwards an officer of the second class in the administration of the hospitals, but in 1830 re-entered upon active service, and went to Algeria. Tn 1833 the became a naturalised Frenchman, and obtained a retiring pension. She has congratulatory letters from Marshals Berthier, Augereau, and Suchet, and from General Dupont, testifying to her bravery and good services. Her voice and countenance are quite of the manly type. She received the medal of St Helena during the. Second Empire."

A great physician says :—Bom idiots frequently come into the world without thumb?, and at the approach of death, th e thumbs of the dying, as if impelled by some vague fear, seek refuge under the fingers. Justice in California is so swift that it sometimes overtakes culprits even before the actual commission of fchecrimes which entitle; them to that designation. The San Francisco Call reports the sever.; punishment inflicted on certain Chinamen for offences they are likely to commit. It was reported the other day that some ore had been stolen from a gold mine in Sierra County in that State. A number of Chinamen who lived in the neighhood were suspected of the crime "on general principles." The miners therefore resolved that justice should take its course, and accordingly set fire to the huts of the Chinamen. The huts were all ablaze, the Chinese were skipping around, and the fun was at its height, when a miner came running up to the scene of conflagration, out of breath, to auuouncethat the real thieves had been discovered and captured. Some of the mob were at this juncture weak enough to suggest the extinction of the fire ; but a prominent miner named Joe Warren argued, with great force, that if the Chinese had not stolen the ore there was no doubt that they would steal something in time, and that the fire had therefore better goon. This view of tho case was accepted by the majority, so " the exercises were continued," and the Chinese burned out completely. A letter from Kovno (Lithuania) in the German St Petersburg Gazette, says that notwithstanding the severe measures taken by the Russian Government against the Poles in that province, the peasantry are still as Polish in spirit as ever, and that if the Government, after completely reorganising the administration on tho Russian model, were to relax any of its restrictions on the Polish element, the Poles would in a twelvemonth recover the position in the country of which they were deprived after the last insurrection. "The attempts of the Government," the correspondent proceeds, "to oust the Polish element by introducing people of other nationalities, have hitherto had but little success. The Russians prefer to emigrate to the south, where high wages are to be got for little work; if any of them come to Lithuania, their life is made so unpleasant by the hostility of the inhabitants to everything Russian, that they soon go away again. As for the Germans, they neither know the language nor the laws, and they are full of prejudices against foreigners. If the Government were to restore to the Poles the right (of which it has deprived them) to purchase property in Lithuania, the estates of the immigrants, who are mostly young and few in number, would rapidly again fall into Polish hands, and the peasant would nowhere be strong enough to be able to compete by himself with the Poles on the peaceful field of intelligence and nationality. The Polish officials, too, are so superior to the Russians in intelligence and power of work, that nothing is to be feared by the Poles on the score of official opposition ; nor is there any hope of abler Russian officials coming to us in future. It is thus more than probable that if the fetters which keep down the Poles here are removed, they will soon recover the dominant position which they held before 1864."

The New York journal, Harper s Weekly. expresses surprise that the Government of New Zealand " has not turned its attention to California as a source of supply of salmon ova instead of procuring them from Great Britain. The interval of time in the passage is very much less, and witVi the same general precautions of an abundant use of ice, there can be no question of a successful experiment. There is every probability, too, that a species belonging to the Pacific Ocean will answer better than one from the Atlantic, the physical character of the waters and of temperature in California, being more nearly like those of New Zealand than those of England." On the same subject the San Francisco News Letter adds that an offer was made to the New Zealand Government four years ago " to do the precise thing that Harper suggests, and no money whatever was to be paid until the experiment was an entire success. Strange to say the offer was rejected on the ground that California salmon, not rising to a fly in the lively manner that their English relatives do. they would not afford as good amusement to the gentlemen of leisure of New Zealand as would the English variety. Surely, the only ground upon whieh a Government is justified in spending public money on such an enterprise is. that it will increase the food supply of the people. For that purpose it is well known that oar salmon is rather to be preferred to the English. It is certainly more prolific, and is at least as palatable."