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Show WORLD BRIEFS An Australian friend sent to the Salvation Army in London forty carcasses of sheep, to be used for the families in the poor districts of the city. Despite the war a preliminary survey has been made for the route of a proposed navigable waterway between the Rhone and the Rhine Rivers. The total cost is estimated to be about $30,000,000. Letters Patent from King George V declare that degrees conferred by the University of Tasmania shall be recognized as academic distinctions and entitled to the same precedence as if granted by any university in England or Scotland. The university had only about 200 students at last available reports, but is growing rapidly and is ambitious in its planning. A good example of an American ' ' Melting P o t " came up in Boston one day last month, when a Chinese laundryman was sued by an Irish carpenter, defended by a Hebrew woman lawyer, conducted into court by a Swedish policeman, and later seated by a French court officer. The witnesses included one Italian, two Syrians, and a Magyar. Three interpreters were necessary to make presentable the questions necessary for a settlement of the case. The Peruvian National Congress has passed a constitutional amendment which provides for religious freedom. Hitherto the practice of any religion other than the Roman Catholic has been against the law, although as a matter of fact other religious bodies have held meetings without interference by the authorities. The amendment, which becomes a law automatically unless vetoed by the president within ten days after its passage, is intended to legalize Protestant worship. The death is announced in England of Dr. J. E. Marks, for nearly forty years a missionary in Burma under the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Dr. Marks was at one time principal of St. John's College, Rangoon, and had among his pupils the son and the grandson of the old King of Delhi, who was state prisoner at Rangoon. The future King Thibaw, after completing his novitiate as a Buddhist priest, studied for a time under Dr. Marks, and the latter declared that despite his bloodthirsty later career Thibaw was not without engaging qualities, and that the excesses which lost him his throne were due to the evil influence of Queen Supaya-lat rather than to inherent cruelty. Europe is seeing strange sights of late, and one of the strangest must have been that Hindu funeral service on the Sussex Downs a few weeks ago. A Brahman, one of the Arya Somaj, had died at the Kitchener Military Hospital, near the village of Patcham. Out on the Downs was a curious little inclosure of corrugated iron, within whose walls was the burning ghat. The strange little procession, chanting its Vedic verses telling of the one and eternal Name, came up the hill and into the inclosure. Then one of the cement platforms was purified and made ready ; the body, under a bright pall and many flowers, was brought in ; the face was exposed, and honey and ghee, minute portions of eight metals, and other ritual things were passed between the pale lips. Then the mourners squatted in semi-circle and went through the singsong chants. At last came the burning, with all the complicated ceremony; and later, after all is consumed, the ashes of this dead Hindu will be sent from England's Sussex Downs to his family in India, to be sprinkled on some Indian river. One of the foremost Jewish theologians, Dr. Solomon Schechter, died in New York, November 19, at the age of sixty-eight. A brilliant student of Talmudic literature, he had received the degree of Doctor of Letters from Cambridge University in England, and the same degree, honoris causa, a little later from Harvard. Dr. Schechter^s most important as well as most romantic contribution to the world of scholarship was made while he was connected with Cambridge University. In the early nineties a number of mutilated and imperfect manuscripts, often only of a page or two, were offered the chief European libraries, and many were bought by the Bodleian. Dr. Schechter helped decipher some of these, and it was learned that they came from an ancient hiding place adjoining the Synagogue of Cairo. One day a scrap of parchment with twenty or thirty lines of almost illegible Hebrew writing on it was shown to Dr. Schechter. He at once recognized it as the long-lost Hebrew original of the Biblical Ecclesiasticus, of which there had been known heretofore only Greek translations, and concerning which there had been endless controversy. Dr. Schechter sailed at once for Egypt, went to Cairo, and succeeded in procuring the whole collection of crumbling, musty but priceless books, manuscripts, and fragments of books in the Genizah, or hiding place, to the number of 90,000 pieces. At the time of his death he was president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. |