in his younger days was a member of the noted Wasatch Literary Society, and the Zeta Gamma Debating Club, organized by the late Dr. John R. Park. He was one of the original founders of the Home Dramatic Club, in 1880. He wrote considerable for various magazines, being a critic of keen taste and close discernment. Some of his best paintings are of the Wasatch mountains and the southern Utah deserts.

Granite for the state capitol is being obtained in the Little Cottonwood Canyon quarries, owned by the Utah Consolidated Stone Company. On the third of February, the company set off a blast in the canyon which brought down the mountain side 277,000 cubic feet of rock in one piece which slid down the mountain side and measured 42 by 76 by 87 feet in size. There were other large blocks that came down at the same time, one containing 10,000 cubic feet, and two others, each containing 75,000 cubic feet, while there were many smaller sections. The shot was fired with one and one-half cans of powder placed 150 feet up the side of the ledge. The amount of granite required for the state capitol is 165,000 cubic feet, so that the immense rock, to say nothing of the smaller ones which came down with that one blast, exceeds greatly the capitol requirements. It will take until fall to cut the big rock and get it out of the way.

The new viaduct constructed by the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Company, at the behest of Salt Lake City, over the tracks on Fourth South from a point half-way between Fourth West and Fifth West to a point half way between Sixth West and Seventh West, has recently been finished at a cost of $150,000. The structure is 1,800 feet in length, and is constructed of steel and concrete. There is a cement walk on each side of the roadway, and the bridge is electriclighted, the lights being mounted on handsome poles erected at close intervals on both sides of the bridge. The construction began nearly two years ago. Another viaduct of a similar character is to be built in the course of the next two years on Seventh South.

The Mexican border embargo upon firearms was lifted on the third of February. The embargo has been in force since March, 1912, and prohibited the exportation of arms and munitions of war from the United States to Mexico. The original prohibition was intended to discourage incipient revolts against regularly constituted authority, but since there is now no constitutional government in Mexico, the president considered that the people should be left free to settle their affairs and put them on a constitutional basis. The foreign press generally recognizes the act as one of great gravity, and a virtual recognition by this country of the belligerency of the rebels. Some of the Argentine and London papers called it "indirect intervention," but the raising of the embargo is generally considered in this country as the logical step to take, since Huerta could get arras from foreign countries, because he controlled the seaports, while Carranza could not get them, because he had no seaports. Carranza's forces recently captured Mazatlan, their first port, which is the home of many rich Mexicans and Spaniards from whom, doubtless, forced contributions will be sought. At this writing Villa is completing preparations for his movement against Torreon where 14,000 federals await his arrival. Villa's men attacked a bandit named Castillo who had been harassing "Mormon" settlers in Chihuahua. Twenty of Castillo's men were captured and put to death, whereupon the latter, in revenge, set fire to the woodwork of the Drake tunnel, at Cumbre, nearly a mile long, on the Mexican Central. The passenger train from Juarez entered the burning tunnel, and several railroad men,

some of them Americans, and forty passengers, died of suffocation, and remain buried in the tunnel. George Redd, an American "Mormon," with a Mexican policeman, were killed by local red-flaggers, at Colonia Juarez on Monday, February 9. The murderers escaped, but the next day the Constitutionalist soldiers caught and executed five of them, including the bandit, Camillo Acosta, and son. Rafael Martinez was called upon to execute them, and among those put to death were his brother and stepfather, but he did not falter in his duty.

The Catskill Aqueduct was opened on January 12 in New York. The subterranean passage, 110 miles long, from Ashokan reservoir at Kingston, in the Catskills, to the terminal station in Brooklyn, was completed on that date. The first contract for the Catskill water works was signed April 10, 1907. At the end of 1915 these water works will furnish to New York City 250,000,000 gallons of water a day from a source one hundred twenty miles away, and by the year 1920, when the water system is expected to be entirely completed, the city will receive 500,000,000 gallons of drinking water every day. The engineering feats of this aqueduct are the most remarkable in the history of the nation. They embrace the crossing of mountains, deep valleys, water-ways, and, indeed, the Hudson River itself. In the city of New York, there are eighteen miles of rock tunnel from 200 to 750 feet below the surface of the streets. The building of this immense system presented more engineering difficulties than did the Panama Canal, and its cost will be upwards of $200,000,000. It is said that 283 men lost their lives in its construction, and 8,883 were injured. The work will give 25,000 men employment for nine years. Mr. Charles N. Chadwick, Commissioner of the Board of Water supply of New York City, in an explanation of the system, in the New York Independent, says:

"It was in getting the aqueduct under Moodna Creek and the Hudson River that the most tedious of all the shaft and tunnel building was encountered. Shaft 1 of the section drops the aqueduct 586 feet, which at this point brings it 160 feet below the sea level. A pressure tunnel then carries it more than four and a half miles through the solid rock to the deep rift in the rock created by preglacial erosion in the valley of the Hudson River. To get under the Hudson gorge the last or more southerly of the Moodna shafts, which had been sunk to a depth of 373 feet, was stepped down an additional 1152 feet, making a total depth for the Hudson tunnel of 1525 feet, below the normal aqueduct level. A pressure tunnel three thousand feet long there carries the aqueduct to the east side of the Hudson River."

Shelby M. Cullom, former United States Senator from Illinois, died January 28. His last words were a wish that he might have lived to see the completion of the national memorial to Abraham Lincoln who was his personal friend. For fifty years he had been in continuous public service, in American national life, which brought him into relation with every president of the United States from Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson. Senator Cullom was born in 1829, in Kentucky. He served six years, in the House, and entered the United States Senate in 1883, serving as a senator until March, 1913. When he entered the Senate he was a spry, active man of fifty-four, but left it a fading, tottering man of eighty-four but with a brain still bright and active. He was the chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission which has for its purpose the erection of a two-million-dollar memorial, in the city of Washington, to Abraham Lincoln.

The old Dominion liner "Monroe" was sunk off Winterquarter Lightship, Norfolk, Virginia, on January 30, at two o'clock a. m., the "Nantucket" having collided with the "Monroe" which latter turned turtle, and in ten or twelve minutes sank to the bottom of the sea, forty-nine passengers going down to death with her. Eighty-five passengers and crew survived. The collision occurred in a very heavy fog. Out of the forty-nine lost at sea, twenty-three were passengers and twenty-six members of the crew. Thirty-one passengers and fifty-five of the crew were saved. One of the most touching exhibitions of self-sacrifice and courage was exhibited by Ferdinand J. Kuehn, the wireless operator. He had just snapped the S. O. S. call, adjusted his life belt, and was standing by the door of the wireless ready to jump from the sinking vessel, when a woman stumbled along the slanting deck. "Where is your life preserver?" asked Kuehn. "I haven't one," the woman cried. "Here, take mine," demanded Kuehn, "I'll get another." Suiting the action to the word, he took off his own belt and buckled on her. The next minute the boat plunged, the woman was saved, but Kuehn went down with the ship.

President Woodrow Wilson delivered his special address to Congress on the regulation of “big business" on January 20. Among the chief points which the president singled out as a basis for legislation

were:

(1) Effectual prohibition of the inter-locking of directorates of great corporations, banks, railroads, industrial, commercial and public service bodies. He advocated that the inter-locking of directors shall not be allowed. This means that the same men will not be permitted to act as directors of different corporations that are supposed to be independent and competing.

(2) A law to confer upon the inter-state commerce commission the power to superintend and to regulate the financial operations by which railroads are henceforth to be supplied with the money they need for their proper development and improved transportation facilities. The president made it clear that the prosperity of the railroads and the prosperity of the country are inseparably connected in this regard.

(3) That the Sherman Anti-trust law shall be so changed as to make its meaning clear.

(4) That an Inter-state Trade Commission be established to furnish information to business men to enable them to conform to the law understandingly and to report violations.

(5) A law to provide punishment for the individuals responsible for corporations breaking the law.

(6) To forbid "holding companies" by which one corporation may now hide behind another; and to restrict the voting power of stockholders who may hold stocks in several corporations.

(7) To allow private persons to bring suits against unlawful combinations and trusts upon facts or judgments established in government suits, and that claims against trusts shall not outlaw until two years after the conclusion of a government suit against a trust.

Congress will doubtless make the president's proposals into law as quickly as possible, as it is clear that there will be little opposition to the sentiments set forth in the president's address. Nearly all the press comments at home and abroad are favorable. The only opposition that has been manifested in Washington comes from the Progressive Party. Representative Murdock, leader of the Progressive Party, having called the president's proposals inadequate. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress seem to agree with the president as to the necessity for legislation on the points he suggests.