everyone stole government timber it could not be a crime within the statute, and he won. IN a suit in the common pleas at Philadelphia, counsel for defendant in his argument before the jury said, •' And now, gentlemen of the jury, if further proof were needed of the lack of good faith of the plaintiff, it can be found in this docu ment in the very handwriting of the plaintiff and admittedly signed by him. I hold it up so that you may all see the signature of the plaintiff, even to the last man in the box." Then casting his eyes at the twelfth juror counsel noticed that he was asleep. Unable to resist the impulse to be witty, he added, "if -he were awake." The laughter of his fellow jurors woke the sleeper and his confusion was very great. But the confusion of the witty lawyer was greater when he discovered that the sleepy juror had argued so strongly against his client in the jury room that the ver dict was for the plaintiff. SIR WALTER SCOTT had his share of curious experiences at the bar. His first appearance as counsel in a criminal court was at Jedburgh Cir cuit Court (Assizes) in 1793, when he success fully defended a veteran poacher. " You're a lucky scoundrel," Scott whispered to his client when the verdict was given. " I'm just o' your mind," returned the latter, " and I'll send you a maukin (i.e. a hare) the morn man." Lockhart, who narrates the incident, omits to add whether the " maukin " duly reached Scott, but no doubt it did. HERE is a judicial Egyptian maxim which is known to have been avowedly acted on : " Strike the innocent, that the guilty may confess," i.e. out of compassion. A FEW months ago two miserly women, mother and daughter, were murdered in Berlin. The murderer is still missing. The mother had willed her very considerable fortune to her daughter. The daughter had excluded her mother and all her relations, appointing no heir. This makes the state heir. The poor relations, however, protest, as there is no proof that the mother died first. The only person who could sol%re this knotty question is Göuczy, the murderer, and he has private reasons of his own for keeping in the background.
' INTERESTING GLEANINGS. PAYTA, in Peru, about five degrees south of the equator, has the reputation, according to Profes sor D. G. Fairchild, of being the driest spot on the globe. On an average, a shower of rain occurs at Payta only once in two years. But the interval between showers is often much longer. In Febru ary last, when Professor Fairchild visited the place, the first rain fallen in eight years had just wet the thirsty soil, having lasted from ю P.M. until the following noon. Yet in that arid climate seven spe cies of annual plants manage to exist, and the natives earn a livelihood by growing a species of cotton whose long roots find moisture in the bed of a driedup river. This cotton is readily marketed.
THE Great Wall of China was recently measured by Mr. Unthank, an American engineer. His meas urements gave the height as eighteen feet. Evenfew hundred yards there is a tower twenty-five feet high. For 1,300 miles the wall goes over plains and mountains, every foot of the foundation being of solid granite, and the rest of the structure solid ma sonry. ALMOST all the towns in Siberia are having are lights for street use and incandescent lights for houses, and the larger proportion of the people in Siberia have never seen gas, which they regard as an illuminant of a past age. "IT is a notorious fact," says THE NATIONAL DRUGGIST, •• that the pineapple is considered the least healthful of all the edible fruits of the tropics by those who know anything of the matter. . . . The juice of the green and growing plant is accred ited in Java, the Philippines, and throughout the far East generally with being a blood poison of a most deadly nature. It is said to be the substance with which the Malays poison their krishes and daggers, and is also accredited with being the ' finger-nail poison ' formerly in use among aboriginal Javanese women almost universally. These women formerly (or some thirty odd years ago), and possibly do yet, cultivated one nail, sometimes more, on each hand, to a long sharp point, and the least scratch from one of these was certain death." PHYSICIANS in South Africa, says a press report, now have another theory for explaining away the charges made by both Briton and Boer that the other is using explosive bullets. The extensive lac eration often found in bullet wounds is now said to be due to the air which the bullet drives before it into the wound. " The existence of this phenomenon
