Morning journal and courier., 1881-03-11
EDITORIAL NOTES.

Hon. Abram s. Hewitt offers help in the
 hunt of the rascal or rascals who constructed the Mercy letter. This is creditable to MT.
 Hewitt. Now let Barnum come forward.
 His assistance ought to be very valuable.
 The owners of horses in Brooklyn, New
 York, are forcibly complaining about the use
 of salt on horse railroad tracks. There are, it is stated, over one thousand horses in that city now afflicted with frosted heels, the direct result of travel in snow water and slush mixed with salt. The disease begins at the fetlock, the leg swells and cracks open, discharging foul matter, and in many cases the blood is poisoned, and the horse dies.
 The Berlin society for training carrier pi- geons recently published some interesting de- tails concerning the rapid flight of these birds At the last meeting in 1880 the pi- geon which won the prize flew in five hours and twenty-seven minutes the distance be- tween Cologne and Berlin, which, as the crow flies, measures 295 miles. This is the most rapid flight which has ever been known. The Berlin society owns 1, ,5OO. old carrier P-6o-H, eAAAA~ NNAA3 -"So JSI@A DO0EAAo coo young pigeons for Paris, Aix-la- -Chapelle and Belgium, with view to ameliorate the breed by mixture of new blood.
 In 3GO cities and towns of the United States live Il, 1850, TIP people. The bonded debt is $664, 346, ,913, an average of $5S.53 per head. Of this debt SIP, 900 in Nevada is at 12 per cent, and of SC, ,O5s, ,620 at 10 per cent. all but $31, 15O is in Western and Southern States. The 8 per cent debt is $1s, ,864, ,O00, mostly West and South. The and per cent. debt is $492, 900, ,ooO and is mostly in the Middle Atlantic States The per cent. debt is $99, ,OOO, 900, and the per cent. is $21, ,0Oo, 1000. It is interesting to know that the per cent. debt is but $9S3,- 100, and is all due by cities and towns in Virginia and West Virginia Three per cent. bonds are manifestly not popular.
 Dr. Cornelius Herz of Paris, has attained an important step in telephony by which the principle of magnetism has been entirely discarded and the magnetic receiver abol- ished. A long series of experiments have been successfully conducted under the pat IOudEo O1 bu0 ECACh SOfOLhAhOAiO VII eAAO oSA- egraphic lines of the State; concluding trials were witnessed by M. Cochery, Minister of Postal Telegraphy, M. Jules Ferry, Prime Minister, M. Leon Say, President of the Sen ate M. Becquerel, and other members of the Academy of Sciences, and by Senators, dep uties, and great number of engineers. One of the most extraordinary experiments was the transmission of speech on single wire from Tours to Brest, the length of which ex- ceeded eight hundred miles. One single Le- clanche's element was the sole battery in use.
 The Standard, of Salt Lake City, the organ of the women of Utah who are fighting polygamy, makes an earnest appeal to the new Congress to refuse admission to George o. Cannon, the delegate-elect, on the ground that he is 'san alien and felon"-an alien as he has never been naturalized, and felon because he is the husband of four wives, in violation of the laws of the country. The Governor of Utah has co-operated with them so far as to issue certificate of election to Mr. Cannon's competitor A. G. Campbell, who is an anti-polygamist, and has the conf- denee af all residents of the Territory en- gagged in this righteous warfare. The appeal to Congress is accompanied with an appeal to the women of America for encouragement and assistance in eescuing young women from the misery which polygamy brings upon them. The impression prevails that the system is dying. On the contrary, they state that more polygamous marriages were made in Utah in 1880 than in any former year since the settlement of the Territory.
 In the schools of Portland, Maine, specia, effort has been made to improve the ability of pupils to speak and write correctly their own language. From the lowest classes of the schools, where the children are taught script letters, written exercises are imposed daily throughout the whole course AS the study of technical grammar was found to be-a hindrance rather than an aid to the requirement of language the authorities have reduced it to narrow limits. They have at tempted to make correct use of language rather than the analysis of sentences the principal object of school work, and to sub stitute practical illustrations of the principles of grammar in place of abstract rules and definitions. To obtain better results from IL Il