The Columbia herald. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 1850-1873, 1872-05-31
FRESHEST GLEANINGS.

A Montana rival bought out his
rival for S29.
The city debt of Chicago is nearly
twenty million.
The New York Seventh Regiment goes
into camp on the fourth of July at Sar-
atOga.
A Texas man has invented a cotton
picking machine which will do the work
of fifty men.
The experiment of stocking the
Schuykill with bass has proved an en-
tire success.
Gone half the year, rain and flowers,
the other half dust and sky,' is Bret
Hartes description of California.
The school children of Washington
protest agsidst the passage of the bill
to take their play ground for railway
station.
There has been great and unusual
mortality throughout the burnt district
of Wisconsin, during the winter and
spring.
4 school boy, fifteen years old, in
Cleorfield, Pennsylvania, stands SIX feet
two inches in his stocking feet, and Is
still growing.
The system of cheap tours from Liver
pool to Bordeaux and the Pyrenees IL
to be continued this year. Fifty dol
lars pays the fare for the entire trip.
The German ordnance departmenthas
reported against the mitrailluse, grape
shot being considered competent to fur
nish the maximum of slaughter with
the minimum of expense.
In Philadelphia the Mercantile Libra
nv has been opened to the public on
Sundays for two years, and the average
attendance has risen steadily from three
hundred per day during the first year
to seven hundred, nearly all Of whom
were young men.
1t is proposed to give an Austrian
railroad company n land grant of over
three hundred thousand square square
miles, or a tract of country four times
larger than the whole Of Great Britain
and Ireland, for the construction OF
narrow gaupe rail road two thousand
miles in Il tngth across the continent.
The omission of the words enacted
by the General Assembly" III the pre-
face to the stringent liquor law passed
by the Ohio Legislature at its recent
session has made the law imperative;
and while the radical temperance party
mourus, the liberals and the topers re-
joice.
A scientific survey of Siberia is about
to be made by the officers OF the lmpe-
rial Geological Society of st. Peters
burg. The work is to begin III June,
and it is expected that it will be COM
pleted in two years.
A French aeronaut has suggested a
new plan for the explorations of the Po-
lar regions. His scheme is take bal
loon to the most northern headland of
Greenland and make an ascension the
first day a steady wind blows from the
west he is certain that he would land
him in Siberia. The French Geograph-
ical Society is considering whether 1t
should not give the scheme its sup
port.
A mammoth century plant, forty feet
| in height and weighing three and half
Il tOus, Hits Dccu blllpptu AApA hS''A
sonville, Fla, to parties in New York
The plant is on the eve of blooming the
second time, and is therefore nearly two
hundred years old. 1t may well be
doubted whether in beauty and gran
deur of appearance this plant has its
equal on the continent. Its leaves ex-
tend over an area the diameter of which
is not less than eighteen feet, while the
central shaft or column on which the
blooms are to appear, though only few
weeks old, has already attained an altl-
tude of fifteen feet. 1t is still growing
at the rate of about six inches a day,
and will continue to do so for about
three weeks longer, when all its upper
portion will become clothed with snass
of bell shaped blossoms of purest white
hanging in dense clusters. and extend
ing for a space of not less than four feet
from the apex downward. A large price
was paid by the purchaser for this mag
nificent specimen, which can hardly fail
of attracting great attention during the
period of its horescence.