The Patea Mail. Established 1875. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 1883. NEWS OF THE DAY.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 1052, 27 June 1883, Page 2

The Patea Mail. Established 1875. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 1883. NEWS OF THE DAY.

Tenders for the lease of theManawapou reserve will be received by the County Council up to Wednesday, July 3. A Government Inspection Parade of. the Patea Rifle Volunteers will be held this and to-morrow evenings. An election of seven Commissioners for the Patea West Road Board will take place on Friday next the 27th inst. A meeting of persons interested in the question of breaking the Insurance monopoly was held at the Albion Hotel on Monday evening, when a resolution expressing sympathy and concurrence with the Wanganui Committee was passed, ' Attention is directed to an announcement of Mr J. Gibson’s, which states that he has discontinued the credit system in his business. Messrs Mace and Bassett are Ihe successful tenderers for the Wai-iti (Nelson) contract for the formation of 2 miles of railway. The amount of the tender was £10,692. The half-yearly meeting of St Patrick’s Branch of the N.Z.H.0.8. Society was held on Monday evening, twenty members being present. After the initiation of some new members, the election of officers was proceeded with, with the following resultßros J Sheaban and P McLoughlin were unanimously re-elected President and Vice-President respectively ; Bro R Whelan, Secretary ; Bro the Rev F Grogan, Treasurer; Bro T Bartlett, Warden; Bro J Lavery, Guardian. Bro P S Gilligan and J Collins were also elected Sick Visitors. The Lodge is now in a very flourishing state, numbering 30 members, and with every prospect of becoming stronger. Mr M. F. Cottle, dental surgeon, who has settled in Wanganui, having taken over Mr Crosse’s practice, has an announcement in another column to the effect that he will visit Patea on Monday July 2. Mr Cottle, who is the first to pass the Dental Examination in surgery in the colonies, has for some time been successfully practising both in Auckland and Dunedin. Mr G. Jobnston has been elected a member of No 5 Ward, Wairoa Highway Board, Attention is directed to a business announcement of Mr Nutsford’s, in another column which states that the whole of the stock of clocks, watches, and jewellery are to be sold at cost price, and that really good bargains may be secured. Professor H. Sample, the celebrated American horseman, will deliver a free lecture in the Waverley Town Hall, on Friday evening, and. will also hold a class the following morning. Those who were present at the class in Patea are at liberty to attend the Waverley one free. The following notice appears’in the Gazette of the 14th inst. : “ I, Anna Mary: Longshore Potts, Doctor of Medicine, now residing in Auckland, having deposited evidence of my :iualifications with the Registrar of Births, Marriages, and Deaths of the Auckland district this day, give notice that I intend to apply to be registered under the New Zealand Medical Act, 1869, on the 12th day of July, 1883.” This lady is now in Nelson giving lectures to ladies. It is understood that she is going round the principal. towns in the colony. She is a Quakeress. A slight shock of earthquake was experienced in several parts of Canterbury shortly before midnight on Sunday last.

' The Rev T Buddie, an old Wesleyan missionary died at Auckland on Tuesday. Says the London correspondent of the Argus , writing on the 4th ult :—The Queen has withdrawn her decree against the killing of lambs this season, so far as to say that she does not wish the general public to follow her example in abstaining from lamb. It is clear that her Majesty was grievously misled, and that she was unwittingly doing severe injury to the farmers. This incident has demonstrated in a remarkable way the immense weight of her Majesty’s personal influence, as well as her ready appreciation of public feeling and the interests of trade. Jumbo gets each day half a barrel of potatoes, half a barrel of bran, and about one bale of hay. Besides this he is given ton loaves of bread, a whole loaf being given him at each mouthful. Besides this the visitors give him cakes, candies, apples and fruits at an average of four or five bushels a day. He can digest anything but nails and quids of tobacco, of the latter of which he is very wary. Jumbo costs to keep from Bdols to lOdols a. day.He lias two keepers, Scott, who went over with him from England, being his constant attendant. There is a special groom attached to his quarters. Altogether he has u pretty good time. Having carefully considered the system of credit trade now almost without exception adopted by all classes throughout New Zealand,. and, being convinced that its general adoption for the purposes of retail trade is unsound in principle, calculated to lead to want of thrift, and, by gradually but surely allowing the expenditure to exceed the income, forming a habit easy to acquire but disastrous in its results. I have determined to discontinue the system of booking goods for the future, and trust that I shall not lose any of my customers by this, but havd"the support of all those interested in establisliing a sound system of trading and a revival of better times. — John Gibson.— [Advt.]

The meeting of insurers which was to have been held at the Rutland Hotel, Wanganui, at 11 a.ra. yesterday morning, did not come off owing to the tariff agreed upon by the Insurance Companies having broken down. The Lyttelton Times has the following “ From the statement of the business of the Government Savings Banks of the Colony during the past year it is seen that the total amount standing to the credit of all open accounts at the end of 1882 was £1,470,950. The number of accounts then remaining open was 57,517’ thus giving an average of £25 11s 5d to each account. The following were the amounts standing to the credit of depositors in the four largest centres of population : Christchurch, £236,675 ; Dunedin, £268.245 ; Auckland, £211,289 - Wellington, £188,923. The average value of each account at the same four places was £25 17s, £23 4s, £27 12s, and £23 4s respectively.* Auckland thus heads the list in this case.”

The cosmopolitan character of New York city has been unpleasantly brought home to the. inhabitants by the discovery of a number of cases of leprosy—at least a score. Four patients suffering from this disease are now in the Charity Hospital, and only one of them is a Chinaman. Physicians in private practice have reported a number of other cases, several of which have undoubtedly occurred from contagion, in the State. One of these is that of a Jersey farmer, who had not been in the city for years, and who must have been infected by contact with some travelling tramp. There are now no less than 4000 Chinamen in New York, and they have succeeded in getting a large share of the laundry business, at least half of them getting their livelihood in that way. It has been found that many lepers are concealed among them, and the most stringent legislation will be necessary to stamp out the disease. Recent investigations have added greatly to our knowledge of the more highly organised parasites of the helminthoid type. For example, it lias been ascertained beyond doubt that the blopd-vessela of a human being capable of performing his daily avocations may contain from 20,000 to 30,000 minute embryo nemaloid worms. A physician at Calcutta demonstrated this with regard to persons in that climate. Numbers of individuals so affected suffer from chyluria or elephantiasis in one or other of its forms, but this is by no means universally the case. Researches have also revealed the curious fact that these teeming multitudes of nematoids lurk in some unknown recesses of the vascular system during the daytime, and that only as night approaches do they wander at large through the vessels generally. Experts assure us that a single drop of blood taken from a prick of the finger at midnight in a person so affected may contain as many as 200 embryo nematoids, while many drops similarly obtained at mid-day will not reveal a single worm. Two warriors in embryo, who proclivities evidently tend in the direction of the Royal Engineers or Sappers and Miners' branch of the service, determined (says a Wellington paper) to illustrate the active duties of the profession, and with this end in view they took the “ tented field” instead of their beds on Friday night last and the result to one of them, at any rate, has proved most disastrous. The boys, who are each about twelve years of age, after school went into camp on the reclaimed land, and fixed up beds with some bagging and refuse they found in the neighbourhood in one of the large water-pipes near Pipitea Point. The lads state they went down early op Saturday morning to one of the sheds erected by Mr J. Saunders, the contractor for the first section of the Manawatu Railway, and obtained a quantity of blasting powder, with which they returned to their camp. Their original intention would appear to have been to dig a small mine or to fire the powder in one of the iron water-pipe. Be this as it may, however, one of the boys, young Slater, applied alighted match to the powder, the result, of course, being that the child icceived serious injuries to his face and one of his arms, the sinews of which are contracted. The boy’s sight •is also impaired to some extent, but it is believed only in a temporary degree. The other child, most singular to say, who was looking on close by where his companion fired the explosive, escaped injury almost entirely. The more fortunate because, perhaps, the more cautious of the two having hastily but fortunately most effectively extinguished the fire which had communicated to his comrade’s clothes, led him home, where he was attended by Dr Kemp, who holds out hopes that the injuries sustained will not prove very serious. How either of the children escaped the total destruction of their eyesight is something almost miraculous. Some very startling statements as to the great and growing increase of illiteracy in the American Republic have (says the Pall Mall Gazette ) been made by the Rev Joseph - Cook, of Boston, in a prelude to one of his Monday lectures. The following are some extracts frora his remarkable presentation of the United States as a whole. Five millions of the fifty millions of the population of the United States over ten years of age cannot read ; six and a quarter cannot write. Of the ten millions of voters of the United States one in five cannot write his name. The nation is now charged with the education of’ eighteen millions of children and youths. Of these ten and one-half millions are enrolled in public and private schools ; but the average attendance is only six millions. Seven and a-half millions, or five-twelfths of the whole, are growing up in absolute ignorance of the English alphabet. At the present rate of the increase of the number of children not attending school there will be in ten years more children in the United States out of the schools than in them. In all but five of the States there were enough illiterate voters to have reversed the result of the last Presidents! election in each of these States. It is estimated by the statisticians # of the Government that the total annual profit to the country by the conversion of illiterate into educated labour could not be less than £80,000,000 a year. The London Engineer , in a recent issue says :—No combination of wings will enable a man to fly until he can wield them with as much muscular power to the pound of weight as a bird exerts in flying. If a man had in his legs the muscular energy and leverage of a flea, he could jump a mile in three leaps, and if his arms bad in proportion to his weight the driving power of a wild pigeon’s wing, he would have no use for railway or balloons. The transportation problemwould bo solved. Moving himself so easily and swiftly, he would not need to move anything else. The albatross, N weighing twenty-eight pounds, can keep its wings thiiteen feet from tip to tip, in motion all day, while the strongest man, weighing six to eight times as much, would exhaust all his strength in keeping even an albatross’ wings in motion for half an hour. “We have in the bird,” says the Engineer, “ a machine burning concreated fuel, in a large grate at a tremendous rate, and developing a very large power in a small space. There is no engine in existence, certainly no steam engine and boiler combined, which, weight for weight, gives out anything like the mechanical power exhibited by the albatross. Consequently no machinery yet devised can operate wings of sufficiet power to sustain its

own weight in the air, and there is no machinery by which a man can wield the force necessary to fly like a bird. Keeley’a alleged discovery, of some new process of storing and exerting great electric power in ' apparatus .of light weight, might supply the deficiency, but science has not learned how to develop inanimate machinery anything like the mighty nervour energy which acts in the bones, sinews and muscles of a living bird’s wing,”