TEMS OF INTEREST March 6, 1909 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

A bill has been introduced in the Senate which provides for a system of old-age annuities designed to take the place of the demand for old-age pensions for Government employes, but extending to all classes. Under it, the Government would undertake to receive deposits and to allow three per cent compound interest thereon. If a person at the age of twenty years deposited twentyfive cents per week, at the age of sixty years such person would be allowed an annity of $129.91. It is also provided that a person of any age may deposit a lump sum equal to the amount that would have cumulated had such a person become a depositor at the age of twenty, and receive the annuity at the close of the sixty-year period. The minimum annuity is fixed at $50 and the maximum at $1,200 for any one person.

The keel has already been laid at yards of the Tebo Yacht Basin Company in Brooklyn of the auxiliary steamer Carnegie, which the Carnegie Institute is fitting out for investigation of the magnetic phenomena of the earth. She has been specially designed so as to contain practically not a pound of steel or iron which would tend to deflect her compasses. What is not built of wood wil be made of Victor Vanadium bronze. The particular problems for which the Carnegie is to be used are connected with the variations of the compass in different locatities. The magnetic North Pole itself is supposed by scientists to waver, and it is held to be of the greatest importance to mariners to ascertain as soon as possible the laws which govern these deflections of the needle from the north.

A report transmitted to President Roosevelt by Herbert Knox Smith, commissioner of corporations, presents some highly interesting history of the organization of the "tobacco combination." Commissioner Smith says that it "deals with the history, from the standpoint of its organization, of the great tobacco combination. Starting in 1890 as the American Tobacco Company, a manufacturer of cigarettes, with a capital of $25,000,000, the combination has now a net capitalization (excluding intercompany holdings) of $316,346,821. It has absorbed about two hundred and fifty separate concerns and now controls substantially four-fifths of the output of each important kind of tobacco manufactures in the United States, with the exception of cigars."

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