ITEMS WORTH READING
The superintendent of an orphan asylum in Oxford, N. C., lately received the following letter, offering a good education to some deserving boy: "Dear Doctor, I wants to git a gude boye from the assylim to hep mee in mye farm wurk. I will treet him cindely and giv him as gude edicatin as I hev got myself. Your truly," etc.
By way of reply to the 14-inch gun which has been adopted, by some other navies, the British Admiralty are constructing, we understand, a 15-inch, 50-caliber gun. If the present rate of increase continues, it will not be long before we are back to the 17-inch caliber, which was used in a few monster weapons of 20 years ago that were mounted in certain Italian warships.
For conniving at the crimes of notorious robbers, eleven of the detective officers of Moscow have been sentenced to various terms of imprisonment—five of them to hard labor in the Siberian mines. The detectives were denounced in a private letter to the czar, written by a thief who had refused to operate with the officers and divide his plunder with them.
One hundred dollars for one standing white pine tree was the stiff price paid to George Burgess of Clark County, Wis. The tree was cut and scaled slightly over 5,000 feet when cut into six logs, making a good profit for the buyer at the present price of lumber. At that rate a quarter section of pine would make a man a millionaire many times over.
According to cable dispatches from Gibraltar, the new battleship "Neptune" has recently made a test of a new system of aiming the main battery, which has been originated by Percy Scott, the father of the modern system of target firing. It is stated that while the "Neptune" was steaming at 13-knots she fired two broadsides in quick succession at a target moving at the same speed at a distance of 8,000 yards, and that every shot went home. The aiming and firing of the guns is done entirely from the conning tower, the duties of the gun crews being merely to load the guns. If this be true, Scott has made an advance second only in importance to his famous improvements of five or six years ago.
At Douen, in France, on the River Seine, there is a bridge that is a sort of aerial ferry. In order to avoid interference with shipping at this point, it was determined to place no structure in the stream or near its surface. Instead of a bridge in any of the ordinary forms, a horizontal flooring, sustained by steel towers and suspension cable, was stretched across the river at an elevation of 167 feet. On this flooring run electrically-driven rollers, from which is suspended, by means of steel ropes, a car that moves at the level of the wharves on the river banks. The car is 36 feet wide and 42 feet long, and is furnished, like a ferryboat, with accommodations for carriages and foot passengers. The ropes that carry the hanging car are interlaced diagonally in such a manner that the support is rigid, and a swinging motion is avoided.
To secure sound rock for the entire length of the Catskill aqueduct tunnel it has been necessary to go down over one thousand feet below the river surface. Investigation was made by wash borings, by diamond drills operated from scows on the river, and by inclined diamond borings started from the bottom of shafts sunk 300 feet on each side of the river. One of these inclined holes was over 3,000 feet long. The inclination was determined by sinking the shaft glass tubes filled with hydrofluoric acid, which etched a true horizontal line on the interior surface.