newly sown field. Sparrows came, ate the grain, and flew away to an orchard to digest it. By a chance, which that farmer must regard as the unluckiest hostile fates could send, some of the spar rows perched in a tree under which a number of valuable hawks trained for falconry were standing on their " blocks," as the feeding perches are called. In due time the strychnine took effect and the sparrows fell dead among the grateful hawks, who, of course, ate all those their jesses allowed them to reach, and, equally, of course, died in their turn. The death of the hawks was speedily traceil to the sparrows, whose destruc tion by illegal methods was traced to the farmer, who, being haled before the bench by the officers of the R. S. P. C. A., was smartly fined; and now the bereaved owner of the hawks contemplates the propriety of "going for" that farmer in his turn, to recover the value of the birds.
CURRENT EVENTS. Ocean waves have on a number of occasions dashed over the tops of light-houses which are one hundred and fifty feet high. As a wave in the open ocean is accompanied by a depression as deep as the wave is high, a ship in the trough of the sea en countering such waves would be banked by hills of water, if the term may be used, three hundred feet high. The largest waves are seen off Cape Horn, ris ing to forty-six feet in height and 765 feet long from crest to crest. Waves in the North Atlantic have been observed to rise forty-three feet in height. In the German Ocean the height does not exceed thir teen and one-half feet, and in the Mediterranean, fourteen and one-half feet. Tht.re is practically no such thing as freedom of the press in Japan. Whenever a newspaper pub lishes something unfriendly to the government it is suppressed, and the editor is sent to prison. The real editor is never imprisoned, though. Every news paper has what the Japanese call a "dummy editor," and his sole duty is to go to jail every time the paper is suppressed for offending the Mikado. Then the real editor changes the name of the paper, and keeps on publishing it. Dummy editors spend most of their time in prison. THEoldest paper in the world is the Kin Pan" of Pekin. For nearly a thousand years it has been pub lished regularly, first as a monthly, up to the year 1361, when it became a weekly, and for the last ninety years as a daily.
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The most widely separated points between which a telegram can be sent are British Columbia and New Zealand. The telegram would cross North Amer ica, Newfoundland, the Atlantic, Britain, Germany, Russia, (European and Asiatic), China, Japan, Java and Australia. It would make nearly a circuit of the globe, and would traverse over 20,000 miles in doing so. The seal worn by the Pope and used by him on official documents to which the signature is attached, has on it the engraving of a fish, with the cipher of the wearer. Since the thirteenth century every Pope has worn a ring of this character, and it is shattered with a hammer when the wearer dies, to prevent its use on a forged document.
Nearly 1,200,000 pounds of colors are used by the United States Government annually for printing paper money, revenue, and postage stamps.
Some of the screws used in watches are so small that it takes 380,000 of them to weigh a pound.
There are in circulation in China at the present time, coins bearing the names of emperors who lived 2,000 years ago. The steam power of the world may be reckoned as equivalent to the strength of 1,000,000,000 men, which is more than twice the number of workmen existing. G01.F can positively be traced in Scottish history to 1457, and it is believed to have been played much earlier than that date.
A proposal was made some time ago in a Belgian journal for the celebration of the seven hundredth anniversary of the discovery of stone coal, which was made in 1197 by a blacksmith of Liege. He found a kind of black earth, and, wood and charcoal being very dear at the time, the thought occurred to him to try its properties as a combustible. This black earth was coal. The man's name was Hullioz; whence the French word for coal — Iwuille. Authentic docu ments show that coal mines were fully worked in Belgium in 1228 and 1229. The use of coal was in troduced into England in 1340, but did not become common till the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was first mined in France in the fourteenth cen tury; in Austria and Bohemia in the last century; while it was mined in North Germany about the year 1200. — Popular Science Monthly.
