General News.

Thames Star, Volume XVII, Issue 5159, 30 July 1885, Page 3

General News.

Russia, says the Odessa correspondent of the Daily JNews, it must be admitted is not very well prepared for war. She is at present masking her military weakness. Her millions of troops are a mere expres« ' aion. Her reserves now being mobilised are hordes of unkempt peasant youths who jfcare totally ignorant of the use of rifled iZweapons which some of them can scarcely carry. Looking on; the other day at the departure of some 500 of these troops for the Caspian, an English captain leaning orer the rail of his quarter deck, remarked, •• they may have quantity, but they certainly have not much quality." This observation aptly describes the general physique of the Eussian reserves. It may be that the old roguish commissariat officialism denudes these poor boys of their proper equipment. I know not, but their extremely!dirty appearance is something worse than that of the convicts whe periodically leave this port for Saghalien. Messrs Appleton will soon publish a work entitled " An Inglorious Columbus," by JS« !*• Vining—an attempt to show that America was discovered in the fifth century by a party of Buddist monks from Afghanistan, one of whom, named Hwui Shan, returned to Asia after an absence of forty-one years. A short account of the land which he visited, which he supposed to be Mexico, was included in the official history of China, and a translation of the account is given in Mr ViniDg's work. The position which Shakespeare occupies in universal literature is suggested by the number of edition of hi« works which have been collected at the Free Library at Birmingham. At the end of 1884 it contained 6,734 volumes. Of these volumes, the English, including 228 editions of the complete works of tbakespeare, formed 3 887 volumes; the German, „847}

French. 492; Italian, 147; Russian, 62 ; Dutch, 85 ; Hungarian, 45 ; Spanish, 31; Swedish, 33; Danish, 29; Polish, 22; Bohemian, 20; Greek, 14; Icelandic, 5 ; Portuguese, 5 Croatian, 2; Frisican, 2; Hebrew, 2; Latin, 2; Flemish, 1; Roumanian, 1; Eoumelian, 1; Ukraine, 1; Wallachian, 1; end Welsh, 1.

The following information is from "Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics":— "In the Crimean war the English fired 15 million Bhots, killing 21,000 Russians, or 700 shots per victim. The French fired 29 million shots, and killed 51,000 Russians, or an average of 590 shots to each man killed. The Russians fired 45 million rounds, killing 41,000 of the allies, 210 shots to each subject. Thus the French proved themselves the best shots in the Crimea, and the Eussians the worst. The figures are to some extent encouraging to those who have a longing for securing glory at the cannon's month, as the chances appear 900 to 1 against being hit, which cannot be called b«d odds. In the Franco-German war, bowever, with improved weapons, the Germans killed a Frenchman every 400 shots, and as they fired off 30,900,000 rounds, altogether they killed 77000 French. There is no record of the number of rounds fired by the French, but 29,000 Germans -were placed Iwrs de combat."