MISCELLANEOUS.

Waikato Times, Volume V, Issue 306, 28 April 1874, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS.

The Collector of Customs at New York has receded from Gibraltar 16 packages, contaimug the effects of B. S. Bnggi,. master of the missing brig Mary Celeste, and of his wife and child. The vessel was found derelict on the high eeas, im-£ injured, and witk the effects of all on board apparently undisturbed, on her Toyage from New York to Genoi. Themaster, his wife, and child, and the crew having mysteriously disappeared, leaving no trace. They have never been heard from, though every effort has beeu made by the Government to ascertain their fate. Dr Erskine was remarkable for his simplicity and gentle temper. He returned so often from the pulpit, minus hi* pocket-handkerchief, and could tell so little how or where lfc wag lost, that Mrs Erskine at last began to suspect that th* handkerchiefs were stolen, as he ascended the pulpit stans,^ by some of the old wives who lined it. So, to- baulk and™ detect the culprit, she sewed a corner of his handkerchief to one of the pockets- of his coat tails. Half-way up the stairs the good Dr felt a tug, whereupon he turned round to the old woman, whose waa the guilty hand, to say wilh great gentleness and simplicity, " No' the day, honest woman, no* the day ; Mrs Ertkine has sewed it in." Proiessor .Anderson, the "Wizard of the North," faroou* for his sleight of hand, died at Darlington on February 3rd.

The decision of Mr Justice Grove (says the Globe, Jau. J 21) upon the question of the inviolability of telegrams will, we believe, be received with general snhslnolinn. The mutter was of supreme impoitnnce to the whole community, and he acted only with a fitt ng sense of the pr lvity of the occasion in taking counsel with his learned hethien. The facts out of which the point arose are simple enough. The Post-office authorities had been subpoenncd to produce the telegrams •which passed during the election. In accordance with instructions from his superiors, an official from the Post-office attended with the telegrams, stating at the same time that he was ordered not to produce them, except under autbouty of the Court. It was upon an application to compel their production that Mr Justice Grove took time to consider, and yesterday he announced that the Judges whom he had consulted were strongly of opinion the order shonld not bo made. The decision is, for many reasons, a wise one. Cases might perhnps arise which would justify the interference of an electioneering Judge ; but a* a matter of general policy the propriety of keeping telegrams sacred cannot be doubted. Even supposing it were justifiable to compel the publication, in open Court of such messages as referred to the election, it would be impossible to say beforehand that private corraspondence might be mixed up with that which was purely political ; and to lay this open for inspection would be highly prejudicial to the interests of the community. Mr Justice Grove, remarks the Manchester Ghcardian (January 21), has declined to compel the Post-office authorities to produce the telegrams dispatched to and from Taunton at the time of the late election, or even to recommend their production. On the contrary, his lordship has a very strong feeling against any such course, and he was careful to add that the other judges he had consulted were of the same opinion. At the same time he stopped short in laying it down as a binding rule, that telegrams are absolutely inviolable. There might be circumstances, his lordship thinks, which would warrant an election jundein demanding the production of telegrami, but at any rate the present is not one of these cases. This decision will give general satisfaction. If the sole means of establishing bribery or agency at an election depended on the production of" sundry telegrams, public opinion would support, an election judge in exercising the extreme powers Tcted in him; but in the Taunton case, the petitioners' counsel did not press his application after the very explicit declaration of the Judge. How inconvenient, and even injudicious, compliance with it might have proved needs no , demon tration. The Standard (January 21) 6ays :— lf a \ merchant has a dispute with his customer A. 8., it is right enough to compel him to produce all letters written, and all entries made with reference thereto, as they bear directly upon the question in hand. But it would be quite another thing if the merchant were required to disclose his transactions with all the rest of the world, of which not one in a thousand would have even a collateral bearing upon the i*sue. This might he urged with the greater force in the Taunton case, because the petitioners sought to look at telegrams sent and received in the belief that their contents would be known only to those whom they concerned. Had the Post-office acted, and the Judge decided, on this ground, it would have been impossible to find fault with either. But, unfortunately, the department has raised the question in a form which may hereafter be the means of defeating justice and keeping back evidence of vital importance. The Daily Telegraph (January 21) observes : — The telegrams sent to or from Taunton during four months must include a great variety of matters, many of them private ; and the public have a right to insist that their domestic or commercial affairs should not be exposed even confidentially to other eyes than those of the telegraph clerks. There is a strange tendency of modern poetic genius to career wildly into philological novelties. The dictionary, expansive as it is, appears to be all too limited a field for the exercise of the genius, and so mysterious and awful verbs and adjectives arise from chaos. This peculiarity is not wholly unpleasant to the average reader ; it is exciting not to know what new word is about to stun him — and besides, if genius be not sufficiently inventive, it is apt to fall gasping into a tumult af dashes and exclamation points, "which is more picturesque than entertaining. Of lack of invention we shall not accuse a person who is kind enough to send us a pathetic ballad in which two attached young people walk through a forest, ' while,' to use his own beautiful expression, ' tho wood-wren jerks its tune.' Neither shall we make that accusation against the poetic genius which, in a ghostly poem printed in a popular magazine, introduces us to a ' Wintering ' phantom, and likewise to divers unimals which 'snork!' Two more remarkable words have probably never been coined. There is a breadth, a boldness in them calculated to appal the ordinary mind. Will othrr 'poets' adopt them? Shall they pass permanently into romantic literature ? They would not, on Ihe whole, ba unworthy of the novel of the period. 'A sudden snork was heard at the portal, and Mortimer, bhntering, dropped the fairy-like find gem-lit hand of the Anastasia " Beautiful ! This poet, by the way, make 3 an inquiry which, fortunately, we find ourselves quite competent to answer. ' What,' he anxiously asks, ' can it be has power to scare The full-grown moon to the idiot stare Of a blasted eye in the midnight air ?' Any reasonable and respectable moon casting a transitory glance upon these verses would be scared into it. — New York Tribune. The British Medical Journal reports that Dr Friedinger, the director of the Vienna Foundling Hospital, has largely shown how greatly the mortality of children within the first year may be influenced by the conduct of those who have the care of them. Until a few years ago, the Jewish infanta were unwillingly received by the nurse 3 ; none but the most inferior would take charge of them, and the mortality among them was as high as 83 per cent. After consultation with the Jewish council, Dr Friedinger offered a reward of live florins to each nurse who would take charge of a Jew child, and an additional five florins if it were alivat the end of a year. The result has been that the mor tahty fell on the first year to 60 per cent., in the second to 43 per cent., and in the third to 29 per cent. A beautiful and high-spirited horse would never allow a shoe to be put on his feet, or any person to handle his feet, without a resort to every species of power and means to control him. At one time he was nearly crippled by being put in the stocks ; he was afterwards thrown down and fettered ; at another time, one of our most experienced horse-shoers was unable to manage him by the aid of as many hands as could approach. In an attempt to shoe this horse recently, ho resisted all efforts, kicked aßide everything but an anvil, add came near killing himself against that, and finally was brought |back to his stable unshod. This was his only defect ; in all other rpspects he is gentle and perfectly docile, and especially iv harness. But this defect was just on the eve of consigning him to the plough, -,vhere he might work barefoot, when, by mere accident, an officer in our service, lately returned from Mexico, was passing, and being made acquainted with the difficulty, applied a complete remedy by the following simple process : • — He took a cord about the size of a common bedcord, put it in the mouth of the horse like a bit, and tied it tightly on the animal's head, passing his left ear under the string, not painfully tight, but tight enough to keep the ear down and the cord in its place. This done, he patted the horse gently on the 'side of the head, and commanded him to follow, and instantly the horse obeyed, perfectly subdued, and as gentle and obedient as a well-trained dog, suffering his feet to be lifted with entire impunity, acting in all respects like an old stager. That simple string, thus tied, made him at once docile and obedient as any one could desire. The gen tleman who thus furnished this exceedingly simple means of subduing a very dangerous propensity intimated that it is practised in Mexico and South America in the management of horses. Be this af it may, he deserves the thanks of all owners of such horses, and especially the thanks of those whose business it may b« to shoe or groom the animal. — Commercial Advertiser, U.S. An American contemporary mentions that a near-sighted hen, which mistook sawdust for Indian meal, and ate heartily thereof, then laid a nest full of wooden bureau knobs, and in three weeks hatched out a set of parlour furniture. A paper was read before the Hackney Scientific Association recently by Mr J. A. Eeeves, advancing an entirely new theory with regard to comets, and by the use of diagrams, he showed that the part of the comet termed the tail being always in a direction from the sun, and therefore as often in advance as behind the nucleus, is not really a tail. That ns comets are transparent, and all matter is known to be either lohd, liquid, or gaieous, comets must be the latter, for solids and liquids are opaque. That the only known power by ■which this gaseous matter can be held together, is gravity which must necessarily have a centre, and every part of the body being free to move, resolves itself into a tphere, the centre of which is in many cases exceedingly dense, gradually attenuated towards the circumference. That the rays of the sun aro refracted in their passage through this spherical comet, thus illuminating the portion beyond the centre or nucleus, which illumination forms the tail. Mr Eeeves then explained bow all the various and peculiar phenomena of comets, such as their shapes, colours, horns, nuclei, as well as their being with and without tails, &c, arise ; and that they are entirely in accordance with the universal laws of natnir. It is stated that 5356 head of cattle and 11,322 sheep were preserved at the N Z. Meat Preserving Co., works at Woodlands in Southland, la3t year. A joune lady, who does not mnnoge her h'< with much skill, wants to know if there is a "he " in lore. Ther° is generally. During the continuance of the Parliament just dissolved in Knghml, there were 163 deaths among tho members— ss in the House ot Commons, and 108 in the House of Lords.