The Cincinnati Daily Star

AN OLD NEWSPAPER.

There has lately been discovered, in the library of the University of Heidelberg, a copy of a newspaper which proved to be the oldest German periodical of which there is now any certain knowledge. It is a quarto volume, bearing the date 1609, and is supposed to have been printed by Johann Carolus, of Strasbourg. The paper was issued weekly—each number consisting of two sheets. It was mainly occupied with letters from correspondents in adjoining States, which were contributed regularly. It is interesting to note that letters from Vienna were about eight days on the route, from Venice fourteen to seventeen days, and from Rome twenty-one days. When the matter contained in the letters, together with the news retailed at second-hand, failed to fill the sheet, the remaining space was left blank. Intelligence of every sort found a place in the journal. Among the most interesting occurrences noted was the manufacture of the telescope by Galileo. The correspondent from Florence writes on September 4 to the effect “that the Government of Venice made a considerable present to Signor Galileo, of Florence, Professor of Mathematics at Padua, and increased his annual stipend by one hundred crowns, because with diligent study he found out a rule and measure by which it is possible to see places thirty miles distant as if they were near, and, on the other hand, near objects to appear much larger than they are before our eyes." (We quote from an account in the London Academy.)

The news received from Prague affords a disturbed picture of plunder and murder in the streets of the city. It appears that at this period men and women were daily seized by bandits, robbed, strangled, and thrown into the Moldau. Seven bodies were taken from the water in one day; and at another time seven malefactors were apprehended, "who confessed that, on the 18th of this month, they threw about fourteen persons into the water, and that their band numbered eighty, who were, for the most part, natives of Prague."