The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1902-04-25
ITEMS OF INTEREST.

Ase Companies have a nominal capital
eouivalent to s420. 900, 000 1t is inter-
esting to notice that iron manufacture
conoprises much the largest NUMBER OF
companies of any trade on the nst'
the total of interpretations peing 20:
of which 81 were owned OUTSIDE OF
Russia. Cotton manufacture comes
next, with 100 companies, only one OF
which is owned by foreigners.
Missionaries in India encounter no
little difficulty in explaining the teach
ings of Christianity so that the natives
make known its topogracy, physlcai
will understand them, as some OF tne
most beautiful passages of the Blple
are rendered almost ludicrous by trans
lation. A returned missionary tells the
Buffalo Commercial of the efforts OF d
young Hindu Bible student to render
Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee.
into the native dialect. The result of
his labors, translated back into Eng
lish, was about like this:
Very old stone, split for my beneht,
Let me absent myself under one OF
your fragments.
The new incandescent electric os-
MUM filament lamp is reported to
have a much higher efficiency than
the present carbon tilament lamp. A
life of more than 1000 hours at nearly
uniform economy of tritie less than
is watts per candle is claimed for 1t.
Such a lamp at a reasonable first cost
would, says the Electrical World, en-
tirely change the situation in electric
lighting A detail of Importance in the
commercial value of the new lamp is
the great scarcity of osmium. 1t oc-
ours in platinum ores in the form OF
an alloy of iridium. 1t is about 100
times as scarce as platinum. 1t is at
present used in small quantities as
chemical reagent. If an increased
market were made for it by the new
lamp it's price would almost imme-
diately become prohibitive unless a new
source of supply could be discovered.
A dispatch from Poughkeepsie, N.
Y, says Isaiah Rhodes is proud OF his
daughter and he has a right to be, for
yesterday she presented him with five
grandchildren. Rhodes is a farmer,
over the river at Bailey's Gap, on the
side of the Shawangunk mountain,
few miles back of Highland. He came
to Poughkeepsie this morning, selling
hoop poles, and, according to custom,
stepped into a Main street cigar store,
where he told a crowd of his friends
about the increase in his daughters
family The mother is Viola MCGOWAN,
wife of James MCGOWAN, a farmer of
fuckers Corners two miles west OF
Milton She is % years of age and has
been married about seven years. Two
years after her marriage she present.
ed her husband with a son, and a year
or two later twins were born. They
are all living. Yesterday Mr.. Birchall
of Clntondale was sent for, and before
he left the MCGOWAN home five hand
some little girls had been added to
the family. Mr. Rhodes said that the
mother and children were doing well.
He is the father of sixteen children
himself.
"A dispatch from Bangor, Me-, says:
Two weeks ago William Storey and
Robert Mitchell of Lubec, small fish
ing town on the Eastern Maine coast,
went to Campobello Island, in Passa-
maquoddy Bay to shoot ducks. While
there they saw floating in the water
dirty white substance, much resem-
bling a huge lump of wax. They wad
ed out and brought the object to the
shore. and examined it, but, conclud-
ing that it was nothing more than a
big lump of grease, they left 1t on the
beach. When they told a friend, Capt.
Isaac Parker, about their strange find,
however, they were astonished to hear
from the lips of that mariner that they
had picked up fortune, and they hur-
ried back to get it. Samples of the
lump were sent to drug houses in New
York. and the report came back that
it was pure ambergris of the first quail
ity. One of the drug concerns sent a
man down to Lubec to buy the lump,
and it is stated that the price has been
set at $50 an ounce, ambergris being
a rare substance. and valuable in the
making of fine perfumes. Mitchell and
Storey have divided the find, and each
has thirty-one and three-uuarter
pounds, or about $751; 900 worth.
Investigation, made possible by a
grant from the Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research, have been car
ried on far enough to warrant DR..
Simon Flexner, of the Medical Depart
ment of the University of PennsyIva-
mia, in saying that the statement could
now be made that the same microbes
cause acute American dysentery in
temperate as we'll as in tropical chimes
and that the disease is identical every
where. In the April number of the
Alumni Register" Prof. Flexner com
pares this disease with the great
plaques of the world and shows that
no other cause of invalidation and
death could be compared with that of
dysentery in our armies in Cuba, Porto
Rico and the Philippines. In our
times, the great plaques" says the
writer, with one or two exceptions,
have not scourged severely the West
ern nations. Cholera and bubonic
plague seem fixed to the East, and have
made only unimportant excursions into
Western lands within the last half
century. The ravages of yellow fever
are chiefly limited to the West Indies
and the Spanish Main, while the other
plaques mentioned are confined to the
East; but dysentery, likewise a plague
has the widest of distributions, and is
never entirely absent from Western
nations, appearing now and again in
epidemic waves of considerable sever
ity. Although generally it appears in
scattered FORM and in force in public
and penal institutions as the follower
of armies it has done the greatest mis-
chief. During the War of the Rebel
lion 1t claimed thousands and was the
most serious disease of the army. It's
Importance cannot be better expressed
than in the words of Prof. Osler. who
says: Dysentery is one of the four
great epidemic diseases of the world
In the tropics it destroys more lives
than cholera. and it has been more
fatal to armies than powder and shot"
In temperate climates it prevails con-
stantly in mild or sporadic form.
breaking out, however, from time to
time, into severe epidemics in which