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cepting in the southern part of Florida. Snow fell in twenty States, extending south to Galveston and New Orleans. The mercury fell to 20° above zero at New Orleans, and as low as 9° above zero at Shreveport, Louisiana, where the unusual cold caused business to be almost suspended. Cotton-picking in the Southern States was suspended. The mercury fell below zero on the 29th at Sherman, Texas. On the 30th the mercury was below zero throughout the entire country east of the Rocky Mountains. North of the Missouri, Ohio, and Potomac rivers snow covered the entire country. Such intense cold in the Southern States has rarely been known before.

31. Mr. Leonard H. Courtney, M.P., appointed to be Parliamentary Under-Secretary of the Home Office, in the room of Mr. Arthur W. Peel, resigned on account of ill-health.

The Governors of St. Thomas's Hospital, acting under the authority of the Charity Commissioners, announced their intention to receive into St. Thomas's Home persons of the upper and middle classes who were able and willing to pay for the benefits of medical attendance and nursing therein-benefits which have hitherto been confined to the poor alone. In order to carry this into effect the Governors appropriated two wards in the Hospital distinct from the other or ordinary wards, and situate in one of the end blocks. These two wards have been fitted up and furnished expressly for the purpose of accommodating patients of the classes above mentioned. Each patient will have a separate sleeping compartment, curtained off with thick impervious linen curtains from the others, and each compartment is lighted by a large window, and is appropriately and comfortably furnished. The minimum charge for each patient will be eight shillings a day, to cover all expenses of treatment, nursing, and maintenance; but patients may, if they desire it, be attended by their own doctor.

-The following is a "Return (compiled from returns made to the Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary) of Cases of Eviction which have come to the knowledge of the constabulary in each quarter of the year ended December 31, 1880, showing the number of families evicted in each county in Ireland during each quarter, the number readmitted as tenants, and the number readmitted as caretakers." The total number of evictions was 2,110 families, and 10,657 persons. Of these there were evicted in the quarter ended March 31, 554 families and 2,748 persons ; in the quarter ended June 30, 687 families and 3,508 persons; in the quarter ended September 30, 671 families and 3,447 persons; and in that ended December 31, 198 families and 954 persons. There were readmitted during the year as tenants, 217 families and 1,021 persons; and as caretakers 947 families and 4,996 persons,

OBITUARY

OF

EMINENT PERSONS DECEASED IN 1880.

JANUARY.

Major Anthony Cunningham, one of the few survivors of Sale's "illustrious garrison" of Jellalabad, died at Hounslow on January 2. Major Cunningham served in the 13th (Prince Albert's) Light Infantry with the army of the Indus, 1839-42, and was present at the storming of Ghuzni, the storming of the Khurd Cabul Pass, the affair of Tazin, the forcing of the Jagdalak Pass, the reduction of Fort Mamov Khail, and the defence of Jellalabad (during one of the sorties from which he was wounded), and the general action and defeat before Jellalabad, on April 7, 1842, of Sirdar Mahomed Akhbar Khan Barukzye, the son of Dost Mahomed; the storming the heights of Jagdalak, September 8; general action of Tazin, September 13; and the recapture of Cabul September 15. Major Cunningham went to Suffuk Kale, under Sir R. Sale, for the purpose of bringing in Lady Sale and the other Cabul captives. He also served throughout the Crimean war in 1854-5, and in the China war of 1857-8.

Ernst Kossak died at Berlin on January 3. One of the chief feuilletonists of Germany. Many persons regarded his humorous sketches as almost equal to those of Jean Paul Richter, whom he seemed to have regarded as his model. He was unsurpassed in his delineations of the characteristics of Berlin life. He had had a professional education as a pianist, and was an excellent although fragmentary musical critic. His principal collected works are "Berlin and the Berliners," "Berlin Silhouettes," ""Berlin Pen and Ink

Sketches," ""Sketches from the Travelling Book of a Literary Craftsman," "Parisian Stereoscopic Slides."

Lord George Augustus Beauclerk died on January 3, in London, in the 62nd year of his age. His lordship was an uncle of the present Duke of St. Albans, being the youngest son of William, the eighth duke, by his marriage with Maria Janetta, only daughter and heiress of the late Mr. John Nelthorpe, of Little Grimsby Hall, Lincolnshire. He was born in December, 1818, and entered the Army in 1838 as cornet in the 10th Hussars, of which he became captain in 1844. He served with the above regiment in the Crimea, including the battle of Tchernaya and the siege and fall of Sebastopol. He retired from the 6th Dragoon Guards with the rank of major in 1857. His lordship was a brother of Lady Cholmeley, of the late Countess of Essex, of the late Lord Amelius Wentworth Beauclerk, and also of the late Duke of St. Albans.

Mr. Edward William Cooke, R.A., died on January 4, after a brief illness, at the age of 68, at his residence, Glen Andred, a short distance from Tunbridge Wells. Mr. Cooke, who was the son of that eminent engraver the late Mr. George Cooke, and of German descent, was born in London in 1811, and early developed a talent for art. This was sedulously encouraged by his father, who placed him under the tuition of the elder Pugin. With him he studied perspective and architecture, and then devoted himself to book illustrations, his principal

efforts being directed to the illustration of botanical works, including among others Loudon's "Encyclopædia" and Loddige's "Botanical Cabinet." Continuing his career as an illustrator and engraver, he published-and this was his first publication -"Shipping and Craft," for which he drew and etched fifty plates, and then drew and engraved twelve large plates, of Old and New London Bridges, published in one volume, after which he turned his attention to painting in oil and water colours. His first works were coast and Dutch subjects, large rough sea and marine views, in which he excelled. Holland was to him at this time a second Fatherland. He visited the country no fewer than sixteen times, and seemed never to tire of depicting its pleasant pastures, its calm dykes, or its rougher seas. Having once taken to the brush, he became an exceedingly fertile painter, and between 1845 and 1854 executed nearly 100 pictures of Italian subjects. After visiting Scandinavia he commenced a series of visits to Venice, and painted a large number of its principal buildings, with the fishing craft of the city of the Doges and its lagoons. These were succeeded by works on a large scale of Arctic scenes, and of scenes in Spain and Morocco, the picturesqueness of the costumes and the buildings in the two countries lending themselves harmoniously to his style. One large work of this class appeared in the Royal Academy Exhibition for 1864, and was greatly admired. The deceased artist was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1851, and was admitted to the full honours of the Academy in 1864, in which year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also a Fellow of the Linnean, the Zoological, the Geographical, and the Geological Societies, of the Alpine Club, and of the Architectural Museum.

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the House of Peers, he became Minister of the Interior. In 1831 he exchanged the Home for the Education Office, but resumed the latter on M. Casimir Périer's death in the following year, when sedition obliged him to declare Paris and several Departments in a state of siege. After an interval of opposition to M. Guizot, he returned to office in 1837, figuring in Louis Philippe's last Liberal Cabinet, but his official career ended in 1840, for he refused the portfolio of Education under M. Guizot, and in 1847 repeatedly urged the King to part with his Minister and concede an extension of the suffrage, then monopolised by 200,000 persons. Faithful after 1848 to the deposed dynasty, he pleaded for its rights of private property, and in 1851 and 1862 issued pamphlets defending it against pecuniary and political reproaches. In 1874 he broke a long silence by a letter complimenting M. Casimir Périer, the younger, on his adhesion to the Republic, which he described as the only feasible Liberal Government. This letter made no little sensation among the Orleanists. During the crisis of 1877 he wrote a series of letters against the De Broglie Cabinet and a sharp rebuke to M. de Fourtou, who had publicly cited him as an authority in favour of the official candidate system. Last year, in a pamphlet entitled "Un Heureux Coin de Terre," he gave a striking account of the improvement he had witnessed in the material and moral wellbeing of his peasant neighbours since his first settlement at Sancerre. February the Republican Senators, who while in a minority had unsuccessfully proposed him, elected him to the first vacant life membership, but without hoping he could take his seat in the Senate, chronic gout having for twenty years confined him to his house. leaves three married daughters.

Last

He

Miss Sarah Smith Stafford, of Trenton, New Jersey, died on January 6. An ancestor of the deceased lady was one of the most distinguished American naval officers who fought against this country in 1812, and personally captured almost the first flag taken from an English vessel during that war. Singularly enough, the officer who performed this feat was himself nearly connected with this country, his family being an offshoot from Lord Stafford's, and also connected with that of the present Sir Stafford Northcote.

The Right Hon. the Earl of Roden,

one of her Majesty's Lords in Waiting, died on January 9, in the 34th year of his age. Robert Jocelyn, Earl of Roden, Viscount Jocelyn, and Baron Newport, of Newport, county Tipperary, in the peerage of Ireland, and Baron Clanbrassill, of Hyde Hall, Herts, and of Dundalk, county Louth, in that of the United Kingdom, and a baronet, was the elder and only surviving son of Robert, Viscount Jocelyn, who died in 1854. His mother was the Lady Frances Elizabeth Cowper, second daughter of Peter Leopold, fifth Earl Cowper, and step-daughter of Lord Palmerston. He was born in Stanhope Street, Mayfair, on November 22, 1846. He was educated at Eaton, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1868; and he succeeded as fourth earl on the death of his grandfather, in March 1870. His lordship entered the army as a cornet in the 1st Life Guards in 1868; he became a lieutenant in 1869, and retired in 1871. He was a magistrate and deputy-lieutenant for the county of Down, and till lately held a captain's commission in the Herts Yeomanry Cavalry. His lordship was appointed a Lord in Waiting to the Queen in February 1874.

Dr. William Budd died at Clevedon on January 9. Dr. Budd was formerly an eminent physician at Clifton, and was born in 1811 at North Tawton, in Devonshire, being the fifth son of his father, a medical man in extensive practice in that district. Having pursued the prescribed term of medical study in Paris, London, and Edinburgh, he took the degree of Doctor of Medicine in the last-named University in 1838, obtaining on the occasion a gold medal for his " Essay on Rheumatic Fever." About five or six years afterwards he settled in Bristol, and in 1844 was appointed physician to the Bristol Infirmary, and soon afterwards lecturer on medicine at the Bristol Medical School, which offices his extensive and continually increasing private practice compelled him to relinquish at the expiration of fourteen years. As early as 1839, while assisting his father during a severe epidemic of typhoid fever at North Tawton, he became convinced, from evidence he then carefully collected, that typhoid fever is communicated by infection from one person to another, and that the contagious poison, as in scarlet fever, smallpox, and some other diseases, is bred in the body of the person suffering from the disease, and nowhere else. He was early led

to the inference that water contaminated by the specific poisons of typhoid fever and cholera was the chief agent in the dissemination of those diseases. In one of his later papers he expressed an opinion that milk diluted with water, as it often is for the supply of towns, might thus become the channel of infection-an opinion subsequently fully confirmed. Continued study of epidemics of typhoid fever in the neighbourhood of Bristol, some of which he clearly traced to contaminated water, led him to the conviction that by proper sanitary measures, rigidly enforced, the ravages of typhoid fever in this country might be vastly diminished, if not, after a time, almost entirely arrested. The principal measures on which he insisted for this purpose were good drainage; a supply of water not exposed to contamination, in our towns and villages; and especially the disinfection of all contagious matters immediately on their issue from the body of the person suffering from the disease. His investigations were not confined solely to the diseases of man. He was of opinion that the spread of disease might be arrested by the slaugter of diseased animals, and by the proper use of disinfectants in contaminated farmyards. He also published suggestive papers on the prevention of cattle plague and smallpox in sheep, when these diseases first caused alarm in this country. In 1870 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Early in 1873, amid incessant professional avocations, he undertook to publish a book embracing the observations he had published from time to time on the nature of typhoid fever, its mode of spreading, and prevention. book had just passed through the press when his long-continued labours broke down his health, and, to the sorrow of the many friends whom his kindness of heart and geniality had endeared to him, he was compelled to relinquish the practice of his profession. His illness was followed by paralysis, and his subsequent life was spent with his family in retirement.

The

Dr. Schneider, President of the Swiss Diet in 1847, died January 14, at Berne. He was born at Meyenrid, a small village in Seeland, in 1804. The circumstances of his family were humble, and at an early age he was sent by his parents in Neuchatel to learn the French language and the business of a baker, for which calling he was destined; but by the kindness of a distant

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