The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1877-03-13 00:00:00


fi3oret Count ti express.
TrESDAY. MARCH 1.1.
4
NOTES OF THE WEEK.

The volunteers are about to lose one of their
oldest and best known officers. Lord Elcho
has announced his intention of resigning the
command of the Scottish Rifles which he has
held for 19 years. He will still remain honorary
colonel. But it seems premature for a man
whose father is still living to resign any post.
However the Earl of Wemyss is 81, and is son
is only a year short of 60; and he has gone
through much trouble in his tune, having lost
his eldest son by a sad accident, and another
in the Ashantee War. It will be remembered
that he, together with his brother-in-law, Lord
Lichfield, and the Earl Grosvenor, now Duke of
Westminster, started a daily paper in the
Adullamite interest nine years ago, and that it
went by the name of "the Lord's Day." By
the way, as Lord Elcho is in such a favour with
the present Government, why does he not
persuade Mr. Hardy to lend the Martini-Henry
rides which are required at Wimbledon in shoot-
ing for the Queen's Prize. Hitherto the War
Office has refused the application; but Lord
Elcho is not a man easily to be baffled, and he
mii.ffit plead that the National Rifle Association
had to take £2,400 from its reserve last year to
meet the necessary outlay for plant and alter-
at all ins in targets. If he were backed up by the
100 volunteers officers or thereabouts which
there is in the House of Commons, Mr. Hardy
would hardly say nay.

Some few months ago, it will be remembered,
Dr. Forbes Winslow published a pamphlet, in
which he attributed the increase of insanity to
Spiritualism, and said that there were 10,000
Spiritualists in the asylums of the United States.
The Spiritualists in this country have made
inquiries and obtained statistic.s, from which it
is estimated that the total number of insane
Spiritualists in American Asylums is 76. Our
Spiritualists are endeavouring to devise some
means of carrying on their seances without
coming into conflict with the law, by issuing a
notice on all tickets admitting to seances to the
effect that a production of phenomena of any
kind is not guaranteed, and that the causes or
sources of anything that may be witnessed are
not in any way affirmed, the bearer being
required to form his own judgment as to the
origin and nature of whatevermay be presented.
Before the committee on Irish Sunday-closing,
one of the witnesses examined was Mr. Super-
intendent Corr. In the course of his evidence
he gave an astonishing account of the compound
sold in Dublin by illicit dealers as whisky. On
one occasion he put a cork into a jar of night-
house whisky. It flew out with an explosion,
and as often as the cork was put in the same
thing happened. He also stated that one
keeper of a night-house had confessed to him
that he could make six or seven gallons of
whisky out of a pint of " French polish." This
evidence, says the Feeomu's J0H,•,1,11 in referring
to the matter, fully conlinns the belief we have
entertained, that the madmen we have often
' seen reeling about the streets of Dublin are not
drunk but poisoned.