The Savannah morning news., 1902-01-13
ITEMS OF INTEREST.

erary event of more than usual i'm
portance. The monument, which is the
work of the Danish sculptor Louis
Hasselrlis, and was planned by Heine S
Austrian admirers, takes the form OF
a pedestal ornamented with Tyre and
surmounted by the poets bust. Herr
Constantin Noske, member of the Aus
trian Reichsrath and President of the
Vienna Memorial Committee, opened
the proceedings. He was followed by
M. CASTOR Deschamps and DIR. Max
Nordau, both of whom delivered elo-
quent addresses on Heine's life and
work.
The growing popularity of Maxim
Gorky seems to be causing the Russian
authorities a great deal of anxiety.
Plays founded on his romances are en-
Enthusiastically received in the theaters
of Moscow and st. Petersburg, and it
is feared that his literary influence will
soon become greater, and, from the
governmental point of view, more
harmful than that of Count Tolstoi.
Having learned that the novelist, who
had already been ordered to leave st.
petersburg, was about to go to Mos
cow, where an ovation awaited him,
the authorities sent some gendarmes to
an intermediate station, with orders to
uncouple the coach in which Gorky
was travelling. His carriage, as is re-
lated in Reuter- dispatch, was "at
tackled to another engine and taken off
in the direction of the Caucasus"
The British Museum during the
past summer, says the Geographical
Magazine, has obtained some impor-
tant fossils of tertiary animals al Pi
kerni, near the Marathon road, about
twelve miles from Athens. The speci-
mems were found at a considerable
depth below the bed of a mountain
torrent. and were so jaMmed together
that evidently the animals We're buried
alive, probably by torrential action.
Abou: 50 years ago DR.. Albert Gaudry,
in this locality, obtained great num-
Der of fossils for the Paris museum
Since then the Vienna academy has
made a smaller collection, but until
the present year the British museum
had scnl no expedition to this field.
Among the principal finds were nu-
merous bones of Hipparion, the three
toed predecessor of the horse; Hella-
dotherium, a short-necked giraffe al
lied to the Okapi, the new mammal
recently discovered by Sir Harry John
ston in the forests of the Congo State;
several skulls of masterdon, and skulls,
teeth and bones of the great saber-
toothed tiger macherodus, specimens
of which have also been found in Eng
land One of the prizes was the re-
mains of perhaps the largest tortoise
ever found in Europe. Very few bones
of rodents or of birds were found, but
considerable collection of land shells
was obtained.
When one remembers the number
and quality of the things of which
that most remarkable of ancient danes,
the Dowager Empress of China, is not
afraid, the fact that locomotive whis-
ties fill her with terror is provocative
of-interest, says the New York Times.
Not of surprise, for the Empress is
both a woman and Chinese, SO she has
double right to be calm in the midst
of real dangers and to develop her
nerves for use on trifles. To plot the
massacre of foreigners, to supply the
headsman with occupation, to keep a
Son of Heaven under her thumb and
to hold her own against the conspira-
cies of envious rivals, innumerable and
powerful-those are not the things to
disturb the equanimity of woman
with the blood and training of this
one. The Shrek of a locomotive is
different. She knows perfectly well
that the sound is harmless, but to
occupation for an idle moment, but
it proves, in a way, the possession of
delicate sensibilities, and so a right
to considerate attention. If the super
intendent of the imperial railway train
had ignored the request of the ancient
dame she would have squealed a bit,
she would have hated him bitterly, but
no serious consequences would have
followed. AS the request was not ig-
Nh0 L nd fI0 Na,f.,
tendent acquired kindly feeling for
each other, and human peculiarities
were again illustrated in the guise of
inconsistencies-whi they never
really are.
Col. Kyle, who used to construct
cars for the Louisville and Nashville,
built them as battering rams, so that
If they got into collision they would
come out whole. says the New York
Press. They did, too. When a Kyle
car rammed any other car it made
sawdust of it. This was on the prin-
ciple of a well known steamship COM
pany, whose orders to officers are to
run full speed in q fog, so that if there
is a collision the company's ship will
cut through the other like cheese.
Some of the private cars of railway
officials are built on the battering ram
at home. John Sabine Smith once lost
two or three hundred thousand dol
lars, par value, of stock in a car con-
struction company whose ideas were
different. The plan was to build cars
cheaply, which meant light and frag-
lie. There was where the money was
to be made in the big returns for cars
on the cost of construction. But every
time one of these cars bumped into
anv other car, if it was only in cou-
plinE, it went up in the air hundred
miles and came down in pieces as big
as matches and wooden toothpicks,
When you ride on the new ferryboats
of the New Jersey Central you viii
notice. when one of them joltS into her
slip. that she comes up against it as
if her bow was the Rock of Gibraltar
smashing into the Rocky mountains.
The new boats also are built on bat
tering ram lines, and any scow or
barge which gets tangled up with their
bows will make driftwood in a jiffy.
Small sympathy is due to Tung Flu
Hsiang, whose decapitation has been
ordered by the Chinese Court, says the
Philadelphia Ledger He is a soldier
of fortune. and one Of a type not un-
known in Occidental countries, swag-
gering bully, cruel ignorant, and only
clever at appropriating to himself the
work of his more capable subordinates.
Tung is not a Chinese, not even a
Manchu, but a Mahometan, or exMa-
hometan, of Central Asia. He first
came into notice as brigadier general,
- ~ hoo rio in Vsc laf faYs