| Summary: | Newsletter of the North Dakota School for the Deaf. 2 THE NORTH DAKOTA BANNER it came to include tbe mainlands on both sides of the Atlantic, “from Egypt to Peru,” as one writer estimates. Ingenious parallels drawn between the known historical facts of those countries have done much, of late years, to lend an air of possibility to this theory. Whether it is or is not, the true hypothesis, it is an interesting bit of material. It was while this powerful nation was endeavoring to add Greece to its domin-jons, that the end came suddenly to all these magnificent dreams of pomp and power. Plato graphically describes this terrible event as follows: “But afterward there occurred violeutearthquakes and floods and in a single day and night of rain all your war like men in a body sank into the earth and the island of Atlantis sank beneath tbe sea. And that is the reason v7hy the sea is in those parts so impassable and impenetrable, because there is such a quantity of shallow mud in the way; aud this was caused by the subsidence of the island.” So ended the glories of the famous Lost Atlantis. The most that has come down to us is a legend rich in beautiful imagery, and, unless the unlikely prophecy of Mr. Donnelly shall some day come true, it is doubtful whether our indefinite knowledge of the mysterious land will ever be greatly enlarged. But even as a myth, the story has its value, and should not be neglected in a summary of the wonderful lore of ancient times.—Katherine Atherton Grimes in Normal Instructor. j* Discoveries Made by Floating Bottles The longest voyages the world knows are not made by men, but probably by floating bottles; and some of the most important discoveries man now treasures have been effected through the agency of these bottles. Experts in oceanography have been using floating bottles as more or less reliable scouts for seventy years—ever since Commander A. 13. Becker, of the British navy, dropped corked bottles overboard at various points in his voyages and compiled a chart giving the result of their wanderings. For years the archives of the port of Hamburg have been supplied with reports on the travels of bottle messages, and our own hydrographic office at Washington has published other reports in the form of details on several of its pilot charts of the north Atlantic. There are now in existence complete bottlo charts of the various oceans of the world, published under German government auspices. Among the most conspicuous commanders of these bottlo flotillas have been the Prince of Monaco, who within three years launched 1600 drift floats and bottles, and the late Roar Admiral Melville, of this city. Admiral Melville urged the geographical society hero to place drift casks on the northern ice floats to determine the currents of the Arctic ocean. One cask, deposited off Point Barrow in 1899, turned up on the northeastern coast of Iceland, 51 years afterward; another, deposited off Cape Rat-hurst in 1900, was found on the northern coast of Norway Si years later. It took only four weeks for a single bottle, dropped by the United States coast survey, forty-seven miles east of the south pass of the Mississippi, to reach Mosquito inlet, on Florda’s eastern coast. The short voyage, finished on May 6, 1S54-, was the earliest demonstration of the circulation of the waters in the gulf of Mexico. So highly valued are all such records that government interest attended the finding off San Diego, Cal., of a bottle dropped more than five years ago in the Ohio river, near Louisville, Ky., by Miss Nora Lea, a fair amateur. The bottle had passed down the Ohio into the Mississippi, on through th* gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic, the Indian and the Pacific oceans, to wash up at last on the beach at San Diego. That long drift rivaled, in time and distance, the famous voyage chronicled in the modern annals of oceanography, which was made by a bottle dropped off the coast of Brazil on December 16, 1900, and recovered on the shores of New Zealand June 9, 190i, a drift of 10,700 nautical miles in 1271 days.—Sunday Tribune. j* -> The End of Mary's Lamb. When the patriotic women of Boston wished to raise money for the historic old South Church, which became financially involved and was in danger of being sold for debt, a public sale having been authorized, to relieve its embrass-ment., Mary took thestockings which her mother had knitted from the lamb’s wool (aud which she had never worn, but kept in memory of her devoted companion, which had beengored to death by a cow), unravelled the yarn, cut it into pieces of a yard and a half in length, wound it upon cards on which she had written her autograph, and sold tbe cards for twenty- five cents each. The stockings, thus converted into yarn, brought over two hundred dollars for the two pairs, showing the widespread interest the people had in those days in Mary and hor lamb. Mary gave this money to the fund which saved the bid South Church.—Selected. Humors of Bad Writing. Lord Curzon, when a young man at college, once found his bad handwriting stand him in good stead. Writing two letters, one to a relative, the other to a chum, he enclosed them in the wrong envelopes. It chanced that in the second letter he had made some uncomplimentary references to his relative and on discovering the mistake he had made he awaited developments with anxiety. There presently came a letter from the uncle: “I have tried to decipher your epistle, but your writing is so atrocious that I cannot make head or tail of it. However, I guess the drift of it to be that you need some money, you rogue, so I enclose a check.” Professor Blackie had a peculiar “flat.” An elderly compositor on tbe Scotchman, however, knew nearly all about the professor. One night there was a particularly difficult manuscript from the professor. It was put before the expert, with an inqury as to whether or not he could sot it. “I could not do that,” said the veteran from Inverrary, “but if I’d ma pipes here I could play her.” Another instance of the usefulness to other poople of illegible handwriting is included in the vast collection of anecdote and fable thatdeals with the writing of Hoarce Greely, the American Editor. One compositor could never get used to his appalling scrawl, aud, in rage at the continued “typographical errors,” Greeley sent a note to the foreman to discharge the man at once, as he was too inefficient a workman to be any longer employed on the Tribune. The foreman did it, but the compositor got hold of the note and took it to another office, where the foreman, after much puzzling, finally read it: “Good and efficient workman and long employed on the Tribune" and promptly took him on.—Tit- Bits. *r «r «r Impartial. “The clocks,” said the bride, “are simply beautiful, and it was lovely of you to give them to us. But—you won’t think me inquisitive?—may I ask why you gave us a pair of them? Of
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