cruelty to animals, in that he was utilizing a bare footed monkey in the collection of his precarious income. After a careful research into the law of (Domestic relations, the court reached the con clusion that Signer Florello was under no legal obligation to furnish his friend with footgear, and the case was accordingly dismissed. IN some of the cases brought against Lord Bacon implying corruption, the sums of money received by him were not gifts at all, but money borrowed, and recoverable as debts. Three of these cases gave rise, after Bacon's death, to a curious question. Being claimed by the lenders as " debts " due to them from the estate, the executors pleaded that they had been decided by the House of Lords to be "bribes." (Bacon, Works, XIV, 264, ed. Ellis and Spedding.) ONE of the most extraordinary cases in which the over-ruling power of sleep was ever exempli fied was that of Damiens, condemned for treason in Paris in 1757. He was barbarously tortured, but remarked that the deprivation of sleep had been the greatest torture of all. It was reported that he slept soundly even in the short intervals which elapsed between his periods of torture. Among the Chinese, a form of punishment for crimes consists in keeping the prisoner contin ually awake, or in arousing him incessantly after short intervals of repose. After the eighth day of such sleeplessness, one criminal besought his captors to put him to death by any means they could choose or invent, so great was his pain and torment due to the absence of " nature's soft nurse." Persons engaged in mechanical labor, such as attending a machine in a factory, have often fallen asleep, despite the plain record of pains and penalties attending such dereliction of duty, to say nothing of the sense of personal dan ger which was plainly kept before their eyes.
INTERESTING GLEANINGS.
A NATURAL soap mine and a paint mine have been discovered in British Columbia. Several soda lakes recently found in the foothills near Ashcroft, we are told by " Feilden's Magazine," have bottoms and shores encrusted with a natural washing compound con taining borax and soda, and equal to ordinary wash ing powders for cleansing purposes. About 275 tons
of the compound have been cut and taken out of one lake, being handled exactly like ice. One lake alone contains 20.000 tons. THE largest library in the world is that of Paris. It contains upward of 2.000,000 printed books and 160,000 manuscripts. The British Museum contains about 1,500.000 volumes, and the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, about the same number.
THE year of 47 B.C. was the longest year on record. By order of Julius Ca?sar it contained 455 days. The additional days were put in to make the seasons conform as nearly as possible with the solar year. THE oldest city in the United States is Albany, N. Y., which was incorporated in 1686, Philadel phia dating fifteen years later. New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia are the only American cities whose population runs into the millions. Some odd con trasts are presented in the tables of statistics, issued by the Department of Labor at Washington, which gives the area covered by the different cities. It appears that Taunton, Mass. .occupies a territory greater than that of either Boston or Baltimore. New Orleans, a city of 285,000 inhabitants, covers 125,600 acres, while Newark, N. }.. with a population of about the same size, occupies less than 12,000 acres. One ex pects to find the manufacturing districts of Pennsyl vania, Massachusetts, and Illinois closely packed : but it is surprising to notice that Richmond. Va., covers only 6,520 acres, and Louisville. Ky., 12,800 acres, as compared with Duluth, Minn., and Des Moines, Iowa, which, with much smaller populations in each case, cover respectively 40,960 and 34.560 acres. HEALTH statistics show that McKeesport, Pa., is perhaps the healthiest city in this country. Its rate of deaths from consumption is only 1.09 per thou sand, as compared with twelve in Boston and New York, and twenty-six in Denver, Colo. — due, of course, to the fact that consumptives resort to Den ver from all parts of the country. The rate of 13.60 deaths per thousand from old age (considerably the highest on the list), is accredited to Salt Lake City, a condition to account for which no theory has yet been brought forward. In Pittsburg and Chicago deaths from old age are only two per thousand.
AT a time when the extension of municipal func tions is occupying public attention, it is interesting to note the figures which relate to city ownership.
