The Arena, Volume 4, Issue 3 (August 1891), edited by B. O. Flower

Thanks to Richard J. Shiffer for post processing this issue!

That Chinese are capable of enduring much for religion is to be seen by the long and toilsome pilgrimages untertaken by many, as also in the works of mortification of the flesh in which their zeal finds vent instead of in proselytism. On one occasion a few weeks ago I was witness to the mortifications of the flesh. The place was New Wang, a temple close to Ningpo, which has recently gained a high reputation for the piety of the inmates. At the time I entered, two priests were undergoing the operations of having the finger burned off. The way it was done is as follows: A string was tied tightly around the finger under the second knuckle; the hand was then surrounded by a ball of clay, and the fist doubled up, leaving one finger sticking out. Round this finger was tied sandal wood, which was lighted, and boiling and blazing resin and oil poured upon it. The person operated on sat in a chair, untied, with the burning hand on the altar. Noting prevented him from moving his hand at any moment. At any time he could have asked, and the torture would have been discontinued. I staid for an hour and a half witnessing this strange sight, all of which time gongs were beating and prayers beying [sic] said. Behind one of the sufferers stood an aged priest, his hands on the shoulders of the sufferer, a young, healthy looking man. From the hands of the old Bonze five fingers were missing, they having been burned off. I must confess that, though I am used to see operations, etc., without a shudder, I sickened at the sight of this needless pain and deformation of God’s image.–The Shanghai (China) Recorder.

People in Paris have been deceived recently by two remarkable beggars. One was an old widow of over 80. She had been living in a house in the Rue du Texel, upon the charity of the other lodgers. She was an object of pity, this distressed, yet ladylike and gentle old woman, and the little purse made up for her each week was contributed to gladly by those who were under the same roof with her. Her room remained locked for over forty-eight hours and the police were called in. The old woman lay upon her bed. A doctor was called. He said she was dead, and an examination indicated that the cause was starvation. There seemed to be nothing work making an inventory of, but the police investigated perfunctorily and under a heap of rubbish they found 3,500 francs in large bank notes. A more careful search revealed in the straw of her bed a heap of bonds and other securities to the value of 30,000 francs. The “poor” old woman’s heirs are being sought for, but there is not the faintest clue to them.

A clever swindler presented himself in Paris under the guise of a deaf mute. He was first noticed by the police while conducting an energetic begging campaign from house to house. Upon being arrested he went into an energetic pantomime, to which the officers paid little attention. In the police station he suddenly lost his infirmity and uttered a torrent of invective against the police. It was afterwards found out that, speaking five languages, he had plied his trade in all the countries of Europe and with remarkable success. His method of operation was to visit only the houses of the wealthy and to strike for large sums. In Paris his operations netted him not less than fifty francs a day. He would first write tot he families he intended to visit. They were always of the foreign colony. The letters would detail his pitiable state. They were well written and seemed to have the impress of truth upon them. A few days later he would call, and, contriving to be seen by master or mistress, would show a host of certificates of physicians, mayors of cities and commissaries of police in proof of what he had written. The interviews with these wealthy people were naturally had upon paper, and the answers to the questions put to him would be so beautifully and carefully written that they would seldom fail to win the sum sought. This young man–Gustav Remshager–is now held by the police, and his conviction is practically assured.

Elephants are completely disabled by one blow from the Arab’s two handed sword, which almost severs the hind leg, biting deep into the bone. This feat is varied by slashing off the trunk, leaving it dangling only by a piece of skin. A Ghoorka was seen by the late Laurence Oliphant to behead a buffalo with a single blow of his kookerie. And Sir Samuel Baker, a man powerful enough to wield during his African exploration the “Baby,” an elephant rifle weighing twenty-two pounds, once clove a wild boar in with his hunting knife almost in halves as it was making a final rush, catching it just behind the shoulder, where the hide and bristles were at least a span thick.

Sir Walter Scott relates how the Earl of Angus, with his huge sweeping brand, challenged an opponent to fight, and at a blow chopped asunder his thigh bone, killing him on the spot. There is a story current in Australia that Lieutenant Anderson, in 1852, during an encounter with bushrangers, cut clean the gun barrel of his adversary with his sword. And at Kassassin it is related that one of Arabi Pasha’s soldiers was severed in two during the midnight charge. But, in the opinion of experts, this is very improbable, even had the new regulation sabre then been in use.–London Globe.

Charles E. Coffin, of Muirkirk, Md., has lately placed at the disposal of the Woman’s College Museum for study and description, in connection with other collections from the same region, a remarkable saurian tooth, recently exhumed from his iron mines in Prince George county. It measures three inches in length, and the herbivorous dinosaur to which it belonged was not less than twenty-five feet in length. The dentine of the tooth, with its beautiful polish and characteristic transverse markings, is almost perfectly preserved, and the delicate serrations of its edges are as sharply defined as when the reptile was imbedded in the lignitic clays of the Potomac formations. The mine from which the tooth was excavated is the same as that from which Professor O. C. Marsh, of Yale, several years ago obtained a considerable collection. These remains were so highly prized by this distinguished investigator that several men and an engineer were employed for a number of weeks in making excavations for the same, says Baltimore American. Though the Maryland dinosaurs were huge animals in comparison with reptiles now living, they are but dwarfs beside some of the gigantic species which inhabited the western North America in jurassic time. During a recent visit to the Woman’s college, Professor Marsh remarked that one of the fossil species he discovered in the west could stand on the lawn in front of Goucher hall and eat with comfort from the roof. This “terrible lizard” was 100 feet long, and the largest animal ever known to inhabit the earth.

Councilman Samuel Bell, a horse importer of Wooster, O., has a Minorca pullet that takes as much delight in catching rats and mice as a rat dog. The hen was raised with a litter of fox terriers, and from being associated constantly with the dogs has acquired their hatred for rodents. She will tackle the largest kind, and while she has never killed a large one, will keep them at bay until the dogs come to her relief. She has killed many half-grown ones. She seems to know that the big rats are too much for her. It is in dispatching mice that she is at home, and two to four picks from her bill always lay the mouse out. A funny part of the hen’s accomplishment is that she will stand for hours on watch for mice, and when one appears, pounce on it with the fury of a cat.

Among the most remarkable of nature’s wonders the subterranean pit at Jean Nouveau, near Vaucluse, France, which reaches a depth of 540 feet, while nowhere more than 12 feet wide, has only recently been explored. The French Society of Speleology (cave study) erected a derrick at the mouth of the pit, which begins with a funnel 15 feet wide at the top and narrows down to 3 feet at a depth of about 20 feet. From here down the crevice in the rock, for such it is, extends vertically, getting wider as it gets deeper, until a depth of about 475 feet it is 12 feet wide. At this point the shaft opens into a roomy cave in which just beneath the opening of the vertical pit a thick layer of clay, containing remains of bones, both human and animal, were found. The explorers found no evidence that the place had ever been visited by man, but tradition has it that criminals were thrown into the “bottomless pit,” as it was popularly called in the neighborhood, and the remains in the cave just beneath the shaft tend to corroborate this belief.

The descent made into the shaft was exceedingly difficult; it established the fact that there must be a further cave below the one now known, but the crevice through which it is accessible is choked up with debris and bolders [sic] so that it will be a very difficult matter to penetrate further into the cave than has been done. The deepest point reached in this crevice is 593 feet underground. Great quantities of water rush through the shaft every time there is a storm, still no trace of water was found in the cave explored, which proves that some other subterranean exit must exist.

A few weeks ago a number of well-known residents of Butte left here on a prospecting expedition to the Big Hole country, says the Inter Mountain. Among the number were W. D. Clark and Thomas J. Howard. They are men of unimpeachable veracity, who number their friends by the hundreds in this city. This latter statement is perhaps made necessary by what is to follow. The gentlemen returned to Butte last evening, and to-day filed for record a location notice of the Catalpa lode claim, which the notice says is located three miles south of Divide station on Fleecer mountain, a portion of country that has not been prospected very thoroughly on account of the large amount of snow in that locality during the summer months. The remarkable part of the locating of this claim is the statement of the locators that they discovered a tunnel fully fifty feet long, which had been driven into the mountain apparently several years ago. In prospecting along the side of the mountain the men found several pieces of good-looking copper ore in a hollow which they first supposed had been a buffalo wallow in the days when those animals roamed the prairies of the Big Hole country. The prospectors, believing that there was a lead somewhere in the vicinity, began to dig in the mountain side. After an hour’s hard labor they were considerably surprised to find the earth suddenly yield to the blows of the pick and a big hole loom up before them. They cleared away the earth and entered a tunnel about six feet high and four feet wide, walled in with blocks of stone. The top of the tunnel was protected by large flat stones, and for about twenty-five feet there was not a break in the primitive timbering. About twenty-five feet from the mouth of this tunnel the prospectors came to a spot where the earth had apparently broken down the stonework, and after clearing away the debris the men were enabled to go in about twenty-five or thirty feet further. Here they came to a ledge, which was carefully examined, but as to what was discovered there the men will say nothing, except that they found some implements made of stone which had apparently been used in driving the tunnel.