GENERAL NEWS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4433, 4 June 1875, Page 3

GENERAL NEWS.

Mr. John Hampden, who has written a book to maintain that the earth is not round, but flat, and published it under the name of “ Parallax,” followed up his achievement by sending scurrilous libels, on postal cards, to a reviewer of his book. The re.viewer sued for libel, and Mr. “ Parallax ” Hampden was sentenced by the Lord Chief Justice to one year’s imprisonment, with a bond in £I2OO for his futux'e good behaviour. The French authorities have refused to pu | on the walls of the “ Salon ” the picture of a distinguished painter, because it presents an episode of the war, and is likely to excite painful thoughts and political passions, “to which art should be a stranger.” New views of art and historical pictures. In the principality of Lichtenstein there is no prison, but they condemned a man to imprisonment for a year. They kept him in the Royal Palace, and he liked it go well that when they offered to release him if be would quit the country, he declined. They finally bought him off by giving him money for his passage to America and an indemnity for going into exile. He went to England, where he has either been hanged or married into the high nobility. One AVhite, a laborer, after filling himself nearly drunk in Glasgow, on a Saturday night, went home late and stabbed his wife because she refused to give him a second supper after he had eaten a first, consisting in part of a pound of steak. The Constantinople underground railway from Galata to Pera was opened lately. This unique work is 672 yards long, and conveys passengers from the level of the Bosphorus to the extreme height of Pera, an elevation of 200 feet, with an average gradient of one in ten ; its greatest depth below the surface is 80 feet. The motive power is a stationary engine working a drum with endless bands, M. Gavaud, a Frenchman, was the original concessionaire ; and the engineer of the work with the company is English. Trains run up and down simultaneously every five minutes, and are calculated to carry 30,000 passengers per diem. The carriages work very easily at an average speed of ten miles an hour, and the construction does great credit to the contractors. —The Times. Commander Lull’s inter-oceanic canal surveying party, which sailed from New York a short time since, have been heard from some distance up the Chagros river in Central America, where they have fixed on a central point from which the whole party, divided into two sections, will take up the survey toward Panama. The Macomber gun is said to have the great range of nine and a quarter miles! A gravedigger at Preston was suffocated by the falling in of a grave which he was excavating. A fine marble statue of St. John at the age of 14, believed to be the production of Michael Angelo, has been unearthed at Pisa. Mr. Seymour Hayden is going to lecture on the best modes of interment, before the Society of Arts. A noble duke has lent him, for the purposes of his lecture, two coffins of wicker work lined with moss.