WORDS IN SEASON.
News are by no means wanting in the newspapers. A surprising telegram from Vienna announces that:—
"A large shark has been captured close to the harbour of Fiume. It is four and a half mètres long, and weighs 1,460 kilogrammes. The stomach contained a pair of human feet with the boots on."
The shark with two feet, and boots inside of it to boot, beats Jerrold's "San Domingo Billy," in Black Eyed Susan, with a watch in his maw—whereby hung a yarn. Provincial journals, please copy, and report a jack that was so big as to have swallowed jack-boots. You may calculate that they will go down with some of your readers too. Nothing like leather.
The gooseberry season is over, but if this were the height of it, the prodigious fruit of that family would be unmentionable to any scientific assembly. Nevertheless, Dr. C. Falberg read a paper to an audience at the British Association upon "Saccharine, the New Sweet Product of Coal Tar," which, in connection with the John Hopkins' University (U.S.) he discovered in 1879. Coal tar has been brought to a pretty pitch. He averred this saccharine to be 250 times sweeter than sugar. Must have used nice means to calculate that quantity of the quality of sweetness. Said it had become an article of commerce—had a large sale in Germany, was perfectly harmless, he had himself used it for nine years, and it produced no injurious effect upon him. Apparently, then, he used to eat it, and if he didn't might have invited his hearers likewise to eat him. This "Saccharine" bears a somewhat long name, which, as it is a commercial article, might perhaps be compendiously replaced with "Sugarine."
The sea-serpent, Python marinus—Python Ambulatoris, or Python Walkerii—seems not just yet to have been satisfactorily sighted either by sailors or marines. However, he may be expected to turn up again very soon, this time probably coiled in constrictor fashion, as an oceanic ophidian, around a Laocoön or leviathan of a species very like a whale.