heim, and a free public library given to Frankfort by the family of Baron Carl Rothschild, in addition to many munificent gifts to Jewish and general charities in France and Germany. Baron de Hirsch gave 50,000,000 francs for Jewish educational purposes in Russia-to teach the Jewish youth self-help and aid in raising the masses to a higher level of culture. New synagogues were dedicated in Alexandria (Egypt), Antwerp, Munich, Dantzic, and Vienna. Among the deaths were those of Baron Todesco, of Vienna; Rabbi Marx, of Bayonne; Dr. Asher Samter, author and rabbi, at Berlin; Joseph Ritter v. Wertheimer, of Vienna; Simon Spitzer, author, of Vienna; Baron Lucien de Hirsch, Alexander Sidi, of Smyrna; Meier Goldschmidt, Danish novelist; Charles Wiener, Belgian sculptor and medallist: Baron Elia Todros, of Venice; Rabbi Dr. Pincus F. Frankl, Leopold Freund, journalist, of Breslau; J. E. Kann, Secretary of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Auerbach, of Frankfort. The seventieth birthday of Prof. Graetz was celebrated in Breslau in November, and a jubilee work issued by a number of scholars, with articles in Jewish history and research. In literature it is difficult to specify the number of new books and magazine articles, without assuming the dimensions of a bibliography. There was a steady activity in all branches of Oriental lore, by Jewish scholars, old and young, although no great work was produced. It is gratifying to note the continued interest shown in Hebrew studies by Christian students. Schürer, KANSAS. The following were the State officers during the year: Governor, John A. Martin, Republican; Lieutenant-Governor, A. P. Riddle; Secretary of State, E. B. Allen; Treasurer, James W. Hamilton; Auditor, Timothy McCarthy; Attorney-General, S. B. Bradford; Superintendent of Public Instruction, J. H. Lawhead; Railroad Commissioners, James Humphrey, L. L. Turner, and Almerin Gillett; Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Albert H. Horton; Associate Justices, W. A. Johnston and Daniel M. Valentine. in Germany, and Stapfer, in France, throw light on the history of Palestine in the early Christian centuries. The year is notable, too, for the movement to erect a monument to Heinrich Heine, at Dusseldorf, his birthplace, the Empress of Austria being a generous contributor. The latest statistics, as published by the annual of a Paris Jewish weekly, place the Jewish population of the globe, for the year ending Sept. 18, 1887, at 6,800,000. France is said to contain 63,000; Germany, 562,000, of whom 39,000 inhabit Alsace and Lorraine; AustriaHungary, 1,644,000, of whom 688,000 are in Galicia and 638,000 in Hungary proper; Italy, 40,000; Netherlands, 82,000; Roumania, 165,000; Russia, 2,552,000 (Russian Poland, 768,000); Turkey, 105,000; Belgium, 3,000; Bulgaría, 10,000; Switzerland, 7,000; Denmark, 4,000; Spain, 1,900; Gibraltar, 1,500; Greece, 3,000; Servia, 3,500; Sweden, 3,000. In Asia there are 300,000 of the race; Turkey in Asia has 195,000, of whom 25,000 are in Palestine, 47,000 are in Russian Asia, 18,000 in Persia, 14,000 in Central Asia, 1,900 in India, and 1,000 in China. In Africa, 8,000 Jews live in Egypt, 55,600 in Tunisia, 35,000 in Algeria, 60,000 in Morocco, 6,000 in Tripoli, and 200,000 in Abyssinia. America counts 230,000, and 20,000 more are distributed in other sections of the transatlantic continents, while only 12,000 are scattered through Oceanica. No statistics for England are given. The Jews in the United Kingdom number fully 80,000, and the Jewish population in the United States is about 600,000. K Legislative Session.-The Legislature met on January 11, and adjourned on March 5. The liquor law adopted aims to suppress the socalled "drug-store saloons," which, under the guise of law, in some localities have practically nullified the effect of the prohibitory statutes. It holds the druggist to a rigid accountability for all sales of liquor, each applicant being required to make affidavit tlrat it is wanted for medicinal or mechanical purposes. The blanks for that purpose are issued by the County Clerk in book form, and are numbered, and the druggist's returns must correspond with a record kept jointly by the clerk and probate judge. The making of a false affidavit becomes perjury, and the signing of a fictitious name forgery. The druggists are also hedged about with pains and penalties to such an extent that any evasion of the law will be difficult and dangerous. The rate of taxation established for 1887 is as follows: 3 mills for State purposes, of a mill to pay interest on the public debt, and a special tax of mill each year for completing the construction of the main or central building of the State capitol. The following are some of the specific appropriations for current expenses for the biennial period, 1887-'88: The Deaf and Dumb Asylum at Olathe, $94,000; the Asylum for the Feeble-minded, $40,000; the Soldiers' Orphans' Home, $46,800; the State Reform School, $73,000; the Insane Asylum at Topeka, $288,500; the Insane Asylum at Ossawatomie, $220,500; the Asylum for the Blind, $38,370. The Deaf and Dumb Asylum receive an extra appropriation of $51,000 for the erection of a central building; the Asylum for the Blind, $18,000, to construct a north wing to its main building; and the Normal School at Emporia, $25,000, for additions to the pres ent structure. The sum of $100,000 is appropriated to the Industrial Reformatory at Hutchinson, to complete the construction of that institution. Two amendments to the Constitution were proposed, to be voted upon at the next general election. The first strikes out a passage that debars colored citizens from joining the militia; the second gives the Legislature express authority to regulate the rights of aliens with reference to the purchase, enjoyment, and descent of property in the State. Other acts of the session were as follow: To create the counties of Garfield, Gray, Haskell, Grant, Stanton, and Kearney, and to define the boundaries of certain other counties. To amend an act regarding cities of the first class, by giving the city authorities additional powers. To authorize cities of the second class to construct and maintain a system of sewerage and drainage. To provide for the consolidation of adjacent cities, and for the platting of land therein into alleys and lots. To authorize counties and incorporated cities of the second and third classes to encourage the development of the coal, natural gas, and other resources of their localities, by subscribing to the stock of companies. To confirm deeds, contracts, and conveyances of private corporations, executed and acknowledged under section 4 of chapter 22, general statutes of 1868, and to repeal said section. To provide for the organization and incorporation of co-operative societies or companies for promoting or conducting any industrial pursuit. To provide for the registration of electors at elections for the location of county-seats. Authorizing county treasurers, in counties of more than 7,000 and fewer than 25,000 inhabitants, to deposit public money in banking institutions. To provide for the appointment of three commissioners, to be known as Commissioners of the Supreme Court, to aid the court in the performance of its duties. [This act was deemed necessary in consequence of the refusal of the people, at the election in 1886, to approve an amendinent to the Constitution increasing the number of supreme judges.] Raising the age of consent in females to eighteen years. To legalize abbreviated forms for deeds and mortgages of real estate. To prevent fraud at elections, and to provide punishment therefor. Prescribing certain duties of presidential electors. To establish the office of Commissioner of Forestry. To encourage the planting and growing of foresttrees and making appropriation therefor. Making it unlawful for any one to have in his possession, or to use, or sell, or give away, intoxicating liquors within one-half mile of any voting-place at any special or general election. To secure to laborers in and about coal-mines, and manufactories, and other firms, or corporations, the payment of their wages at regular intervals, and in lawful money of the United States, and to prevent any restrictions upon such laborers as to the place for purchasing their supplies. Amending the State pharmacy law. To prohibit grain-dealers, partnerships, companies, corporations, or associations, from combining or entering into any agreement or contract to pool or fix the price to be paid for grain, hogs, cattle, or stock of any kind whatever, and to provide punishment for the same. For the appointment of a commissioner to examine and audit the Price reid claims. Providing a method for the improvement of county roads. To transfer certain lands to the permanent school fund. Providing for an assistant Auditor of State. Appropriating $13,000 for the establishment and maintenance of a silk station in Kansas, appointing three commissioners to assume charge of such station, and to promote the silk-culture in the State. Regulating the shipment of live-stock and grain. Granting to women the right to vote in cities of the first, second, and third class, at any election of city or school officers, or for the purpose of authorizing the issue of bonds for school purposes. To encourage the manufacture of sugar, by offering a bounty of two cents a pound upon all sugar manufactured in the State from beets, sorghum, or other sugar-yielding plants grown therein, the total bounty to be paid in one year not to exceed $15,000. To authorize townships to provide public parks and cemeteries for the inhabitants thereof, and to levy a tax for the same. Making counties and townships liable for defects in bridges, culverts, and highways. To authorize city and township treasurers and treasurers of school districts and boards of education to register all warrants or orders drawn upon them and not paid for want of funds, and providing for the payment of the same in the order of registration. To authorize the city of Leavenworth to issue bonds and incur indebtedness not exceeding $10,000 for encouraging the development of its coal and natural-gas resources. Providing that all bonds hereafter issued by county, town, or city authorities to railroads, shall be redeemable at pleasure after ten years. Providing for the police government of cities of the first class by a board of police commissioners, appointed by the executive council, and for a similar government of cities of the second class in certain contingencies. The total number of acts was 241, an increase of 34 over the previous regular session. Prohibition. The following extract from a public letter by Gov. Martin summarizes the history and the effect of the prohibitory law: The prohibition amendment to our Constitution was adopted in the autumn of 1880, and the first laws to enforce it went into effect in May, 1881. The war to banish the saloons was for some years only partially successful. The amendment had been adopted by a very meager majority, and public sentiment in all our larger cities was overwhelmingly against it. As late as January, 1885, saloons were open in fully thirty of the larger cities of Kansas, including Topeka, the capital of the State. But steadily and surely the public sentiment against them spread and intensified. The small majority that had voted for the amendment was re-enforced, first by those law-respecting citizens who are always willing to subordinate their personal opinions to the majesty of law; and, second, by an equally large number who, observing the practical results following the abolition of saloons in different cities and towns, became convinced that Kansas would be a more prosperous, happier, and in all respects a better community of people if it had not an open saloon within its borders. One argument of the whisky interest-viz., that saloons promote the prosperity and growth of communities-has been answered in Kansas by the convincing logic of facts. In 1880 the population of this State, as shown by the census, was 996,096; in March, 1886, as shown by the State census, it was 1,406,738; and it is now fully 1,650,000. In 1880 Kansas had only 3,104 miles of railway within her borders; on the 1st of March last the State Board of Railroad Assessors reported 6,208 miles for taxation, and from 600 to 800 miles will be added to this aggregate before the close of the year. Live-Stock. The following table exhibits the number of head of live-stock assessed in the State, compared with the returns for 1886: Horses 491,055 552,544 2,007,607 2,082,257 670,950 752,916 1,171,150 1,029,774 In 1880 the assessed value of all the real and personal property of the State aggregated only $160,891,689; on the 1st of March, 1886, the total was $277,575,363; and for the present fiscal year the returns thus far received indicate a total of $300,000,000. In 1880 there were 5,313 school-houses, 2,514 churches, and The State Capitol.-Considerable progress was 347 newspapers in Kansas. There are now fully 8,500 made during the year toward the completion school-houses, 3,500 churches, and 700 newspapers. of this structure. Up to the end of the year In 1880 only fifty-five towns and cities had populations in excess of 1,000 each; in 1887 more than 200 $329,766 had been spent upon the central towns have cach over 1,000 inhabitants, fully twenty- building, and $313,155 upon the west wing. five have each over 5,000, and four have each over The east wing is substantially complete. The 20,000. In 1880 only 8,868,000 acres were planted in special tax imposed by the Legislature will encrops; this year the area planted exceeds 16,000,000 In 1880 the value of the farm products of able the work to be forwarded according to Kansas was only $84,521,000; for 1886 their value the original plans. was over $264,000,000. For the fiscal year 1880 the percentage of State taxation was 5 mills; for the present fiscal year the total percentage levied for all State purposes is only 44 mills. acres. During the past two years and a half I have organized seventeen counties in the western section of the State, and census takers have been appointed for four other counties, leaving only two counties remaining to be organized. The cities and towns of Kansas, with hardly an exception, have kept pace in growth and prosperity with this marvelous development of the State. Many of them have doubled their population during the past year. And it is a remarkable fact that several cities and towns languished or stood still until they abolished their saloons, and from that date until the present time their growth and prosperity have equaled and in some instances surpassed that of other places with equal natural advantages. Two cases decided by the United States Supreme Court in December of this year form important landmarks in the history of Kansas prohibition, sustaining, as they do, the right of the State to suppress absolutely the manufacture of intoxicating liquors within its limits. These two cases were Muegler vs. the State of Kansas, and the State of Kansas vs. Zeibold and others, the latter being an appeal from the United States Circuit Court, where Judge Brewer had decided against the contention of the State. The higher court overruled this decision, and sustained the validity of the Kansas law at all points. Education. The following is a summary of the work of the public schools for the year ending May 31, 1887: Number of school-districts 8,164 521,091 10.501 23 Number of teachers.... $7,776,746 KEELY MOTOR, THE. John Worrall Keely, who claims to have discovered a new etheric force, was born in Philadelphia Sept. 3, 1837, of parents who died in his infancy, and has lived and worked ever since in that city. He had attended the common schools of Philadelphia for one or two terms before he was twelve; after that time he had to support himself, learned the carpenter's trade, and worked at it. As an inventor, Keely has been the subject of more controversy than any scientific claimant of the century. He has been ridiculed, perhaps, more than either Galileo or Fulton, while the believers in his alleged discovery of a new force, which he has been so far unable to manage satisfactorily, think the result of his thirty years of study and manipulation has been a discovery greater than Galileo's celestial system or Fulton's steamboat. He says that from his earliest years he was drawn to the study of sound as related to force, and that he began his first systematic investigation when hardly ten years of age, making his first encouraging discovery at thirteen. As a child he observed how windows were often agitated by the heavy tones of an organ, and this led him to suspend glass dishes, and watch for any effect that might be produced by chords he was able to secure by the combination of different tones. He soon found that certain chords invariably resulted in the forcible agitation of objects at a distance. His earliest mechanism for noting the uniform force of sound-vibrations was a steel bar set full of pins of various lengths; while his first "resonator or "intensifier" consisted of a shingle screwed to two hollow wooden tubes. The first engine was a simple ring of steel, with 300 pins set into it, and this first wheel ran in an open box, into and through which an observer was free to look while the wheel was in motion. For more than sixteen years Keely pursued his investigations in the effort to work out his discovery, using the two elements water and air in connection with sound-vibrations as the media in which to operate his new force. He began with the simplest possible form of vibrator in a shingle screwed to two hollow wooden tubes, recording the vibrations by means of a steel bar studded with pins of various lengths. The result was surprising: the sympathetic flow induced even by this, the first order of vibratory association, being infinitely more tenuous and penetrating than the electric current. The best idea of what the Keely motor is can probably be obtained from a careful examination made not long since by a disinterested Englishman. He recalls how Tyndall and others have satisfactorily demonstrated that in motion is to be sought the true origin of sound, heat, light, and probably electricity-in a motion that is vibratory, the pulsations of which can be calculated if not explained. The new chemistry goes further and discovers a constant motion of the atoms among themselves. Keely's idea is the liberation of that motion in its primitive or quasi-primitive form, THE LIBERATOR. Дорого and its application to the use of man; the resolution of that ether, so-called-vastly more tenuous and intangible than electricity itself in which the waves of sound and light are supposed by scientists to be produced. The discovery of the fact that objects composed of a material such as glass could be made to vibrate at a distance only in response to one particular chord to which their mass seemed to respond, led to the discovery on which his work is based -the finding of the so-called "chord of the mass" of any material body, and the application of this discovery to the production of vibrations at will. The utilization of this chord produces disintegration of the body in question, and this disintegration in turn is capable of being converted into motion. It seems impossible to understand Keely's own language. For an uneducated man he has a surprising command of words. He says: "All operations of nature have for their sensitizing centers of introductory action triple vacuum evolutions. These evolutions are centered in what I call atomic triple revolutions, highly radiaphonic, and thoroughly independent of all outside forces in their spheres of action. In fact, no conceivable power, however great, can break up their independent centers. So infinitely minute are they in their position that, within a circle that would inclose the smallest grain of sand, hundreds of billions of them perform, to an infinite mathematical precision, their continuous vibratory revolution of inconceivable velocity." In giving a description of the nature of his force and what has been involved in the multitudinous changes necessitated in its development-omitting all thought of the methods of its practical application, which has ever been a problem by itself Keely says: "The different conditions include the change of the mediums for disturbing equilibrium, under different mediums for intensifying vibration, as associated with them progressively from the molecular to the interetheric: first, percussion; second, undulation; third, vibratory undulations; fourth, vibratory percussion; fifth, water and air; sixth, air alone." There is not the simplicity of a great truth in these statements, yet they may represent a distinct idea in Keely's mind. The result of his thirty years of work is a machine popularly known as the "Keely motor," but called a "liberator" by the inventor himself. Its production has "absorbed," he says, a quarter of a million dollars. Yet it is not satisfactory to him, nor has it demonstrated its usefulness to others except by lifting weights on the end of a lever in his workshop. An English writer declares that not long ago, in the presence of several gentlemen interested in mining operations, Mr. Keely bored, with his engine, eighteen feet in eighteen minutes, into the quartz rock of the Catskill mountains. But there is no other evidence of this astounding fact, of which American newspapers would have been only too glad to get hold. The Keely Motor Company was formed in 1872. The board of directors, seven in number, has been composed for several years past of six residents of New York and one resident of Philadelphia. A few gentlemen have been and are very eager that Mr. Keely shall immediately impart his "secrets" to some one; and in their eagerness, say his defenders, to have this done, they assume that it can be done in a half-hour's time. For twenty-five years Mr. Keely has been exploring a realm of science the most subtile that can be imagined, to wit: the phenomena of acoustics and sound, which embrace the science of music. He has not been content with the construction of machinery for the purpose of utilizing soundforce as a motive power, but has been recording his experiments day by day, and promises shortly to publish the result of his twenty-five years of research in this branch of science. |