ses to introduce a social war that
has no definite purpose, but the indulgence of the angry passions
which have been generated abroad by tyranny and poverty.

ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION.--The Australian colony of Victoria has
appropriated $50,000 for two ships to make a voyage of scientific
exploration in the Antarctic circle.

"THE DESERT SHALL BLOSSOM AS THE ROSE."--"The 'Great American Desert'
was long ago found out to be a myth; and now some of the remotest
corners which were once supposed to be included in it are proving to
offer the largest promises of value for agricultural and grazing
purposes. In New Mexico, for example, it has long been thought that
certain immense areas must always be comparatively useless because of
their natural aridity. But engineers have just completed plans for
tapping the Rio Grande with a canal and thus bringing under irrigation
a tract some ten miles wide and a hundred and fifty long, containing
nearly a million acres. The addition of so vast an area to the arable
land of the Territory means, of course, a large increase in the
productive resources of that section. Other canals may possibly do as
much. The work of sinking artesian wells is also going on there
extensively, while the project of constructing great storage
reservoirs, in which the rainfall of the wet season may be collected
and from thence gradually distributed through the dry season, is
already in serious contemplation by private enterprise. Modern
scientific irrigation has already accomplished wonders for the
agriculture of Utah; it seems likely to do even more for New Mexico."

LIFE AND DEATH.

122 YEARS.--The great-grandfather of the dramatist Steele Mackaye,
named John Morrison, was an old Covenanter and preached in the same
parish a hundred years. He lived to be 122. His name, written in the
old Bible after he was a centenarian, looks like a copperplate.

154 YEARS.--The Cincinnati _Evening Telegram_ recently published a
special from San Antonio, Tex., which says: News has just reached
here, from a most reliable source, of the recent death in the State of
Vera Cruz, Mex., of Jesus Valdonado, a farmer and ranchman of
considerable possessions. This man's age at the time of death was
indisputably 154 years. At Valdonado's funeral the pall-bearers were
his three sons, aged respectively 140, 120, and 109 years. They were
white-haired, but strong and hearty, and in full possession of all
their faculties.