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Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 18, Issue 1190, 6 December 1871, Page 2

We extract the following passages with reference to the morality of the Auckland mining speculations from an article in the Southern Cross :—" The disclosures which have lately been made in our law courts cannot have failed to impress those who have given the sub jeefca thought, that mining morality in this province is at a very low ebb. The mining cases which have come before the Supreme Court in both its civil and criminal jurisdiction, as also' those which the inferior courts have been called on to deal with, show a state of things in connection mining transactions than which nothing can be more unsatisfactory In mining

disputes, as they have lately come before the public, there is so much, so thoroughly disreputable, and so infested with barefaced chicanery in all the surroundings of the cases, that those whose business draws them to the arenas of our Law Courts cannot but be astound ed at the mendicity by which iniquitous demands are sought to be substantiated, or demands, just on the face of them, and righteous} in their every outline, are resisted by an amount of hard swearing, which must almost paralyse the pen of a Judge who has to take down the evidence, as it must utterly shock the feelings of jurymen who are compelled to listen to it."

A correspondent of the London Echo sends* to that paper an account of an impostei-. The first step is this. An advertisement appears in one of the daily papers somewhat to this effect :—- " Wanted, for three months, the loan of .£3O, for which ten per cent, interest will be paid, and a bonus of £5 given. Valuable pioperty, worth more than three times the sum required, will be deposited with the lender for security. —Address A. 8.," &c. The bait appears rather a tempting one, and presently the hook is swallowed. The advertisement is answered, and an interview arranged. At this interview A.B. states that the loan is only required for a temporary and purely exceptional emergency/and that he has pieferred raising the money in this way to having recourse to his friends. He adds that the property he is prepared to deposit as security is some family plate, worth nearly, if not quite, £IOO. The plate is seen, the security considered satisfactory, and the loan effected, the lender congratulating himself on having done a very good stroke of business. For a few days his tranquility remained undisturbed. At the expiration of that time " Ah," exclaims the astute reader, " 1 sea it all now. The plate turns out to be no moie silver than was the gross of spectacle rims bought by Moses Primrose at the fair." Wrong my dear sir (or madam, as the case may be). The plate is as good silver as ever bore Hall mark. " Well, then, it has been stolen and this means adopted of raising money on it." In error again —the plate has been come by honestly enough. "In what, then, does the imposition consist V You shall learn. A few days after the transaction has been completed, a rather gentleman-like person calls upon the lender of ihe money, and asks to see him in private. He then says with a very mysterious air, " You lent .£3O the other day to an individual of the name of A. 8., upon the security of some plate." "1 did," replies Yictim. " Have you a pawn-broker's licence 1 " is the next y and apparently, irrelevant question. "Certainly not," is the surprised answer. " My business is of such and such a nature. Why do you inquire?" "You are not, then aware that you have rendered yourself liable to a penalty of £IOO for lending money on silver plate without a licence." "A hundred pounds" gasps Dupe. " Yes, a hundred pounds," retorts the other coolly, taking from his pocket, as he speaks a copy of the Fawn-broker's Act in vvhich the clause referred to (with which not one in a thousand is acquainted) duly appears. " The fact is," continues the stranger, " the plate on which you lent the £3O is in reality mine, and was only deposited by me for safe keeping with the individual who placed it in your hands. He had no authority from me to do so, but being a connection of my family I cannot very well institute proceedings against him. At the same time 1 am not disposed to lose the £3O. You have as you perceive, rendered yourself liable to a penalty of more than thrice that amount. Eeturn me the plate, and the business is settled. If nor, I must, of course, let the law take its course." The victim sees now the trap into which he has fallen. Of two evils he chooses the least; he surrenders the plate, and—minus the .£3o—retires from the transaction. In a tract of country in the northwestern part of Africa, distinguished for its dry and rich soil, a gigantic perennial melon has been discovered, which is a most delicious wholesome fruit, and which is largely consumed by theuati\e inhabitants as food. In order that this melon should flourish it is necessary that it should strike its roots through the sand thirty feet to reach permanent moisture. This it does, and grows in great luxuriance where all else is shrivelled and parched with heat. But this is not all. If it was simply a huge melon with smooth and delicate skin, every one would be destroyed by wild beasts before coming to maturity. To prevent this, nature has armed its outer rind with a covering of long, sharp, terrible thorns, which so terribly lacerate the mouths and noses of animals, that they are glad to let them alone in all their tempting freshness. Man with his hands and sharp knives, finds little difficulty in opening the luscious, fruit,

The natives have no necessity of putting fences about their melon patche% for the plants are selt-protective.

The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg recently passed through Panama on his way to Europe. He is at present translating from the Mexican some annals of the world's history from the time of the Deluge, and which, he asserts, bear out every supposition contained in his previous works; confirm the views of Agassiz and other geologists as the great movements which the world's surface as undergone; prove the former existence of a continent which joined America and Africa; that civilisation was carried from the so-called new world to the old; and finally, that the ancients knew more of geography and the currents of the ocean than is known at the present day. . The manuscript from which he translates is written in Mexican in Latin characters, and in its introduction states that it was copied in this manner from hieroglyphic characters on bark by a priest of the house of Montezuma, who feared its contents would be lost because the Spanish conquerers at that time were seizing and destroying everything they could lay their hands on which might tend to preserve the existence of the former language, or orthography of Mexico. The publication of this work will cause great discussion amongst the savans, and this the Abbe anticipates ; he says that he believes finally the whole world will be compelled to acknowledge the truth of the statements he makes, but which at the present are sneered at by scientific men, and entirely pooh-poohed by historians.

Eecently a workman assisting in making some joinery repairs at the Bank of Australasia, Ballarat, had occasion to remove the drawers from the counter, when he found in a crevice behind a drawer, a mous-e's nest and upon closer examination, discovered that its material was a rum her of banknotes, more or less gnawed into undistinguisliable fragments. It was found (says the Ballarat Star) that the larger portions represented one iUO-note, one £5-note, and one iU-note, along with & mass of minute fragments of other notes which may represent any imaginable amount. Beyond the fact of the figures on three of the notes having been left decipherable nothing is known of the original value of the hoard, but it is just possible it may have amounted to ,£IOO or more. How the notes ctoie within reach of the mice does not appear, but it is probable that they v ere extracted piecemeal, for building purposes, or they have passed over in repeated shuttings of the drawer. The fact remains, however, that the evidences of a considerable sum of lost money have been brought to light, and outside people are left to speculate how it has happened and how it is to be accounted for. It is said that many years ago, a teller of the Bank in question was unable to account for a deficiency, and had in consequence, to refund the amount, although he did not lose his situation. Possibly this discovery may have something to do with that remote transaction.

The paper read by Sir Duncan Gibbs before the members of the British Association respecting tat women, and his allusion to the great lady herself, will probably contribute to the success of Miss Heenan's exhibition in Oxford st., London. Passing down that busy thoroughfare the stranger is struck by seeing a huge water-color painting placed against a house. The picture represents the colossal Miss Heenan receiving a gift of a watch and chain from a pigmy concourse round her. This lady, according to Sir Duncan Gibbs, who doubtless is quite, accurate as to his measurements, is seven feet in width round the body, and although she is only 22 years of age, weighs 22 stone. A large portion of the weight named, Sir Duncan assured his audience, was real muscular development, and he made them stare aghast when he prognosticated that, as years roll on, Miss Heenan would further increase, and " might ber come the largest and heaviest woman the world had yet known." The spirits of the ladies present returned, and a smile as if of triumph stole over their countenances, when the speaker declared that enormously fat women were rare when compared with men. In

another pert of bis address he referred to centenarians, men and women, and stated the interesting fact that all the men he had ever known to live a hundred years carefully avoided the habit; of snuff-taking or smoking. The incredulous men who make a point of disproving the age of every centenarian will say this statement does not prove much. Not long ago there was seen on board the timber-laden ship Henry Woolley, lying in the Victoria Dock, Leith, a useful but unusual p'.ece of machinery, so far as ships are concerned. The vessel was making water, and to save the crew the heavy labor of pumping her, a windmill* with simple machinery, was connected with the pumps, and when the wind was blowing high recently, the mill was revolving with great velocity, and doing the work well. Such an application was adopted with marked advantage on board an Aberdeen guano vessel, which sprung a leak when she was a month out at sea, on her voyage from Callao to Leith. A handy carpenter, who was on board, set to work at the suggestion of the captain and rigged up a windmill, which relieved the crew of their extra work, and enabled the crew and ship to jttrrived safe to port. The. use of the windmill for pumping barges is very very common in America. They are employed on most of the North River ice barges that ply between New York and the up-country ice**tablishments.