Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1872-05-11

At spirit meeting the other night a gentle
man requested the medium TO ask what amuSe-
mentS were most popular in the spirit world?
The reply was Reading of obituary notices."
The Emperor William, lately receiving a
splendid piece of massive silver plate from the
Cologne banker, Herr Won Oppenheim, accord
ing TO the Berlin correspondent, said, in the
manner so peculiarly his own, that he himself
was not in position to make similar and
equally valuable present 10 any one.
A Californian, Samuel Brannan of Calistoga,
has $500 mulberry trees whose leaves, this wear,
can for the first time be used for feeding silk
worms. He offers to allow twenty or thirty per.
sons skilled in sllk-wOrm culture the use OF all
his mulberry leaves, and also agrees TO erect
whatever buildings they say are requisite for the
conduct Of the business
In Missouri lead mine there was lately dis
covered what appeared TO be sheet of mineral
twenty feet long and tWenty-One inches broad
The rock and dirt being taken away from all
round it with view of getting to the bottom of
the precious chunk, il has already, preserving
the breadth and length given, developed into a
column four feet high, with no appearance of
giving ont.
new journalistic innovation is about TO be
made in the shape of daily London paper. to
be issued exactly at noon, portion of its con-
tents to consist of reproduction of the Opin-
ions of all the morning papers on every subject,
classified under distinct and initiative headings,
so that the reader can turn Immediately TO the
journal whose opinion he wishes TO learn, and
so condensed, that the essence of the entire
press may be obtained in less time than is now
occupied in reading one paper"
Russia is about to inaugurate a new system
of taxation. Hitherto only persons liable 10
military service have been liable to taxation, so
that the mobiles and government officials have
shifted all burdens Of the sort on the peaSartry
and the manual aborers. This extraordinarily
unfair discrimination is to be done away with.
To will ftnrb no o1 nj
tary service very nearly so.
Physicians in various parts of the country say
that nervous complaints are more frequent at
present than they have been for many years. 1t
is attributed TO the fact that during the cold, dry
weather of February and March, the atmo-
sphere was to an unusual degree Surcharged
with electricity; while the warm, damp, limp
days of April produced feeling of nervous eX-
hauStiOn such as the hard drinker feels when he
first breaks his habit.
A paper recently read before the French acad-
envy OF science by one of the most distinguished
physicians of France, said that after the govern
ment troops entered Paris it was found that the
bodies of soldiers killed in the streets decayed
much less rapidly than did those of the COM
munsts. This was attributed TO the fact that
communists were greatly addicted to the use of
intoxicating drinks. Of AL corpseS examined,
296 were those of notorious drunkardS.
Some years ago. in England, they levied a tax
on horned cattle; a shrewd farmer had few
polled among his herd, which he kept and sold
the horned. When the assessor came around
he told him he had no horned cattle and would
not pay his tax. He was taken before a magis-
trate, when he proved that he did not own n
horned animal. He was discharged, and parlia-
ment altered the law.
Mr. Bryant, in his correspondence from Next
co, describes Il visit to a founding hospital,
where he was surprised to find that three-fourths
of the inmates were girls. On asking a reason
for this he was told that the proportion of
births in Mexico is about three girls to one boy,
a fact which is said to be established by the sta
tsticS of the country.