Not until the accounting was to be filed did he assert his desire to be paid his salary. However, there will be no pay day for the unpaid clerk in the near future, as the estate is not inclined to recognize the claim, and it will be made the subject of a jury trial in the surrogates’ court under the new law.
The accounting shows that John Fox, son of the former politician, received only $1,121 as his first year’s income from the estate, while Eleanor B. Fox, granddaughter, received $1,000, and Mrs. Catherine O’Brien, a niece, a similar amount.
1,827,000 Persons Get Aid in France.
Official statistics give the number of applications for government aid as 2,116,000, of which 261,600 were refused. At present daily allowances are paid to 1,857,000 persons, the average a family being two francs 10 centimes—forty-two cents. The daily outlay is 3,900,000 francs—$780,000.
Much Despised Weed Has Medicinal Value.
Thymol is an important antiseptic. For years it has been manufactured almost exclusively in Germany, from a plant cultivated in India. At the beginning of the European war the price of this medicinal chemical rose from two dollars to seventeen dollars a pound.
“Yet during all these years,” says Professor E. Kremers, of the University of Wisconsin, “while we have been importing about ten thousand pounds of thymol annually, a weed growing on the sandy areas along the lower course of the Wisconsin River has probably been producing enough thymol to have supplied the entire United States in the present crisis.”
Although attention has been directed again and again to this medicinal agent, this weed has been allowed to go to waste. Because of its thymol, it is not even touched by grazing cattle or sheep. Yet after the thymol has been removed, the exhausted plant is eaten by animals, and may thus be converted into a useful agricultural product.
Now that the supply from Europe is cut off, requests for seed and plants have been received at the Wisconsin pharmaceutical experiment station.