The Savannah morning news., 1902-01-31
ITEMS OF INTEREST.

! "A Western congressman calls atten-
tion to the fact that, the Hepburn BILL
providing for the construction of the
I Nicaragua canal at an expense of $780,
100000. is comprised in 4S6 words. He
says that "a mighty lot of doings can
can be crowded into a small area Of
| space"
According to the Express Gazette,
there were 16 train robberies last year
and % in 1900 In the past II years 306
trains have been held up" by robbers
and 95 persons killed and 105 injured
by being shot. In the past two years
five train robbers were killed and two
wounded and two passengers and
trainmen killed and 10 wounded.
"A Sevres porcelain tower is to be
erected on the heights of st. Cloud, the
spot where the famous Diogenes Ian
tern was destroyed in 1871. The tower
will be 148 fet high and 26 feet in diam
/ eter. There will be seven stories and
double winding staircase inside. II will
be built inside and out entirely of GER
annie stone ware and porcelain, and will
be decorated externally with blue, tur-
quoise, emerald green. brown, coral and
rose-tints on a white porcelain back
ground.
The officers of old st. Johns Church
on Church Hill, Richmond, Va, contra
dict with much warmth a published
story to the effect that the venerable
| structure is to sold to make way for
block of commercial buildings. The SEN
! ior warden, Capt Cyrus Bossieux, says
that the church does not owe a cent to
anyone. 1t was in this church that
Patrick Henry made his celebrated
Give me liberty or give me death"
| speech in 1775, and it is the delight of
| all visitors to Richmond to stand in the
pew in which he uttered the memora-
BILE words.
An application to repeat in the
Pantheon the pendulum experiments
tried by Leon Foucault in 1851 has
| been made by the Astronomical So
! ciey of France. A pendulum was
swung from the dome and swung to
and fro, leaving a little notch in a
| sand ridge built in a circle on the
| floor of the church. The notch made
| by each successive swing was a little
distance away from the preceding
| notch, and at the end of twenty-four
hours they had gone completely around
! the circle. This proved that the earth
had revolved.
There is row over the beautiful
castle of Heidelberg. One set of archi-
tects declares that the ruins are in
dangerous condition and proposes
the restoration of the greater number
| of buildings to the condition in which
they were when the French burnt the
castle in 1889. Others assert that the
| ruins will stand forever and that the
| projected restoration is an act of van
| dalism, as no trustworthy description
| of the castle before it's destruction is
to be had. The ruin is the chief at
! traction in the town to Germans and
| foreigners.
"A scandal has arisen over the re-
burial of Robert Hammerling, the Ger
man poet. who died in 1889 He was
moved into a permanent tomb in the
cemetery at Graz, when the coffin was
opened and the medical men present,
among whom were two university pro-
fessors. surreptitiously and without au-
thority removed the head, in order
ito measure the skull. Since then the
skull has been kept in the anatomical
labratory of Graz University. Ham
| erling's relatives and friends are in
! dfgnant, and demand that the poets
head shall be put back with the body
| at once.
"A Russian officer, hunting through
some old family papers, came on what
seemed to him evidence that certain
Russian families, now extinct, and
some monks of the monastery of Potch-
ajowska, not far from Kieff, had dur
ing the .Napoleonic wars buried in that.
institution sum of $4.000,000 to keep
| it out of "Bony's" clutches Included
among the papers was a diagram show
ing evactly where the treasure was de-
posted. The officer is quite sure it is
there yet, and has gone to Kieff and
! made bargain with the present gen.
Grafton of monks in the institution to
! give them two-thirds when it turns up.
The bishop has not yet given his sane
| ton TO the enterprise, but is being la
bored with to that end, and may be fool
| enough to countenance it, in which
case the diocese would be better off un-
der the direction of a less credulous and
imaginative prelate.
Custom has imposed the use of the
bolster and the pillow, but it does not
of necessity follow that they are ad-
vantageous or conducive to sound
sleep, says the Medical Press and Cir
cular. Physiologically, we are entitled
| to entertain a doubt seeing that physi-
ologists are still unable to say authori-
tatively whether the brain in sleep is
general
perience is that the lower the head .he
deeper is the sleep, and vice versa Apart
from morbid conditions which render
1t impossible to some persons to sleep
with the head low, conditions which
vary and infinitum from mere prefer
! ence for thick bolster to positive or
thopnea, habit, and, possibly, physio-
| logical conformation, render the head
low position in bed intoerable to some.
On the whole, it would seem that in
order to obtain sleep as deep and re-
poseful as possible, we ought to aim at
| having the head as low as is consist
ent with actual comfort. To submit to
actual discomfort, in view of prob
lematical and much disputed advan-
tage, is not an experiment that will
commend itself to the majority of man
kind.
The task of clicking" $4,000 envel-
opes is one which confronts the United
States Pension Office once every three
months, says a Washington dispatch.
At one time this was a herculean un-
| dertaking, but the inventive genius of
man has now made it easy. By means
of an electric automatic sealer the en-
velopes containing the check and
voucher which are sent to the $4,000
pensioners in the western district of
Pennsylvania each, quarter are
licked" and sealed at the rate of 25-
| 900 a day. This daily capacity is not
reached, however, as not so many en-
velopes are ever ready, at one time.
1at1w ~