ENGLISH ITEMS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5054, 5 June 1877, Page 3

ENGLISH ITEMS.

A great exhibition is to be opened at Naples on the 2Sth April. A congress of chess players is to be held in Cologne in August. Brigham Young is now so feeble that he has to be wheeled about in a chair.

The second Italian expedition for the exploration of Central Africa arrived at Suez lately. The death is aunounced of Commander James Alexander Gordon, R.N., at the age of eighty-nine years. He entered the navy in 1804?

A bronze equestrian statue of Lord Canning, by Foley, and destined for Calcutta, has been cast at the Manor Ironworks, Chelsea.

The Mayor of Wittenberg's proposal to found a Luther Museum in the house where the Reformer resided is about to be carried out.

It is reported that the ex-Empress Eugenie has asked Marshal MacMahon for permission to cross France, on her way to visit her mother in Spain. Rural meteorology is progressing rapidly in France. No fewer than 500 parishes receive by telegraph daily warnings from the observatory.

A movement has been set on foot to raise a company or companies of Volunteers among the students and past students of the London hospitals. Mr. J. Kimpton, aged fifty, a medical bookseller, has died in Loudon from injuries from a fall caused by having trod on a piece of orange peel. The C'omte de Elandre, who was born on the 24th March, 1837, now becomes eligible for the Belgian Senate, the members of which must be forty years of age. At the Paris Assize Court, a priest named the Abbe Beaujard has been sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor for assaulting two girls under thirteen. The case was tried privately! Out of the batch of twenty-one division officers of Inland Revenue summoned to compete lately in London for the examinership only eleven put in an appearance. The Patriarch of Lisbon is organising a pilgrimage to Rome. A commission has been formed to assist poor pilgrims to defray their expenses. The Patriarch will go with the pilgrims. Lieut.-Colonel Joseph Webster, a Military Knight of Windsor, and late of the 78th Highlanders, died at Windsor Castle lately, after a short illness.

The Lords of the Admiralty have announced that they cannot accede to the memorial forwarded by some of the officers aud men of Chatham Dockyard asking for an increase of p a yThe House of Assembly has approved of the Government proposal to send Nova Scotian delegates to the conference to be held upon the question of a legislative union between the maritime provinces. In a letter to Prince Bismarck the Emperor William says, the " excessive plentitude of kind wishes" from all parts of the Empire, on the occasion of the completion of his eightieth year, has rendered the day a peculiarly sacred one to him. M. Kedicr, barometer maker to the French Association for the Advancement of Science, has devised a barometer for warning miners when the atmospheric pressure is undergoing a sudden depression, so that they may be on their guard against fire-damp explosion. In the courts r,f a sale of pictures by Messrs. Christie, Manson, and Woods, in London, lately, a most interesting work by Sir Edwin liiimincer sold for ii'Ja 11k. It was a greyhound aud dead hare, painted iu ISI7, when the artist was only 15 years old. In fro.it of tho chancel screen of St. James' Church, Hateham, were four paintings representing Scriptural subjects, executed by the late vicar, the llev. Arthur Tooth. On a recent Saturday night or early on Sunday morning some one gained access to the church and covered them with a thick coating of black paint. The perpetrator gained admittance to the church by the baptistry door, which had been left unfastened.

Dr. Mark I'rager Lindo, whose humorous sketches, published under the name of "Old Mr. Smith," were well known in Holland, has died in that country at the ago of 70. Dr. Tjindo was a native of London, but graduated at Utiecht, and at the time of his death held in his adopted country the honorable post ol Government Inspector of Schools for South Holland, an appointment not before conferred upon a foreigner. He was for many years Professor of the .English Language and Literature in the Military Academy of Holland. It appears that we have four varieties of torpedoes at present in use in the navy. Hervoy'a torpedo is towed against an enemy by a rope from the yardarm of the attacking ship. The ground torpedo is sunk at the entrance of harbors and fired by electricity, either from the shore or by a scif-actiug apparatus set in action when touched by a vessel. The spar torpedo is employed for boat service, and is of the same pattern as that so successfully tried recently by the French naval authorities. But the most deadly weapon of all is the Whitehead, or fish torpedo. This is a cigarshaped cylinder, fourteen feet long and sixteen inches in diameter, containing a bursting charge of 3001bs. of gun-cotton. It is arranged

so as to travel at any depth under the waterline that may be wished, and is propelled by a scrow worked by compressed air. The head of the machine contains the detonator which explodes the charge; and it can be set so as to explode on striking an object, or at any distance under 1000yds ; if it misses its mark, it can be so arranged as to float, on half-cock, so as to be recovered. It will travel for one thousand yards at the rate of twenty knots mi hour, so that at night a vessel might easily be blown up without being aware of the presence of an enemy.