NEWS IN BRIEF.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 970, 11 December 1882, Page 2

NEWS IN BRIEF.

* Hawking is once more becoming fashionable in France. England derived last year £450,000 from the duty on carriages. An alarming epidemic of dysentery prevails in some parts of Sweden. Florence Nightingale’s training school sent twenty-four nurses to Egypt. The Central Gao] in Rangoon, Burmah, is to be lighted with electricity. St. Martin’s, Canterbury, is believed to be the oldest church in Great Britain. The town of Kashin, in Hie government of Tver, Russia, has been destroyed by fire. An Albanian plot to massacre and rob the Christians at Scutari was frustrated by hill tribes. Mr Dillon’s retirement was attributed to his dislike of the “ milk and water ” policy of his associates. The Austrian army is to have a railroad brigade. familiar with putting up and destroying railroads. The Turkish Government has bought 200 Nordenfcldt machine guns in England, paying-for them in advance. Observations of the comet made at Washington tend to confirm its identity with the comet of 1843 and 1880. It is stated 3000 shares of the Auckland Land Company were sold at Nelson. “ General Booth ” says that South Australia is the only colony in which the Salvation Army lias fairly established itself. It is shown by statistics just issued that last year there were 17,251 known thieves at large in England, of whom 12G0 were in the city of London. Charles Williams, of Twickenham, who served in the ship Bellerophon at the. battle of Trafalgar, lias just died ay Leyton, Essex, in his 101st year. Mirrors forty-five by fifty-two feet, and weighing from twelve hundred pounds, have been lately placed in the Paris Opera House. Crazed by the misconduct of her two daughters, a woman chopped off one of her hands at Parkville, Conn., striking not less than a dozen blows with a hatchet. The London Times, in an article on the Suez Canal, says that England cannot allow the Suez Canal Company to arrogate to itself such extensive powers as it claims. The Czar, as an act of clemency, has commuted the sentence of death of Nagorniy and Jewsejeff, political criminals, to hard labour in the mines for an indefinite period. A Russian Pole, who was banished to Siberia, owing to participation in the Polish insurrection of 1832, has just returned home after nearly fifty years’ imprisonment. The London World has statistics to prove that lawyers have less sickness as a class than physicians, but as an offset physicians can get their medicines for about 60 per cent. off. A despatch from Vienna to the Daily Telegraph sa} r s 26 bodies have been recovered in the flooded districts in the Tyrol. An eighteenth of a third share in the new Ballmore coal-mine, near Dubbo, recently changed hands for £350. A man threatened to shoot bis wife at Saco, Me,, if she didn’t confess a fault of which he bad accused her, and then shot her because she did. It lias lately been found that the phylloxera has extended to La Vendee and Haute Vienne, in France, which had been supposed exempt. Some of the landowners in Scotland are taking personal charge of their property rather than submit to a reduction of rent to tenants. The Portuguese Government has signed a contract for a cable from Lisbon to the American coast, touching at the Azote Islands. Lord Jersey has promised £IOOO towards building a higher education college for South Wales, in furtherance of Mr Mundella’s proposals. The phylloxera has made its appearance in several places in Switzerland, vineyards in lower Austria, in southern Hungary, and in Servia. Herr Krupp, the celebrated gunmaker of Essen, is said to have invented an absolutely immobile floating battery for coast defence. A man over sixty years of age is reported by the British Medical Journal to hove made 156 miles in twenty-four hours on a tricycle. A young rival did 185 miles in tiie same time. Through not having a copy of the Koran a hand, at the inquest on the wreck of the Austral one day, the coroner could not ex, amine the Lascar witness called to identify the bodies of his countrymen drowned in the Austral.

The Camperdown Chronicle tells an amusing story of how on a recent visit to a school in the Port Campbell district, the pedagogue (who had not been supplied with books or slates) was found amusing the children by walking up and down the school, with his arms akimbo, balancing a pole on his nose. Penny postage will be established in France before the end of the year. M. Cochery has prepared a bill reducing the general stamp from three sous to two and it is certain to pass. A brief telegraphic record of the destruction of the Garden Palace by fire, on September 22 last, appeared in the London Mail the evening issue of the Times), through Renter's Agency the same evening. A band of eight mounted brigands infesting the country near Nicosia, in Sicily Robbery and a murder have already been committed. The Government has set a price of 500 francs on brigand arrested. About two hundred soldiers and police are on their track. The Danish Society for the Protection of Animals at Copenhagen offers two prizes ' one equivalent to £4O and the other to £BO for the two best essays upon the possibility of replacing vivisection in physiologica research by experiments upon the bodies of animals recently killed. The buried treasure of the buccaneers is once more about to be discovered. An immense treasure is said to have been discovered in a little island off the Chirique coast. A large number of pearls have been dug up, and an armed party has left Panama for the purpose of concluding the investigations, A fisherman caught recently in his net at Queen’s Ferry, a few miles below Chester, England, the largest salmon ever caught in the Dec. It was found to turn the scale at 40 pounds, was four feet in length, and. a healthy, clean, and well-developed fish.