Items of Interest January 31, 1914 Issue

Items of Interest

The site set aside by the government of Panama from public lands on the west coast of the bay of Panama, about forty miles south of the city of Panama, for the proposed town of New Gorgona, to be settled principally by persons removed from the area of Gatun lake, has been formally dedicated. New Gorgona has now a population of about six hundred people, some of whom have erected their houses, but most of whom continue to live in the temporary quarters provided by the government. Roads have been cleared and telegraph connections established. The site of the town is a level plateaurising about fifty feet above the sea, and the agricultural lands are about two miles back from the coast.

In cooperation with Connecticut's plans for developing New London as an ocean port the war department has recommended to Congress a channel thirty-three feet deep at mean low water and six hundred feet wide, at an estimated cost of three hundred and thirty thousand dollars. To complete the work in two years the department recommended a first appropriation of one hundred and seventy thousand dollars and a second of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, conditioned upon assurances that the state will carry out its terminal plans, for which it has already appropriated one million dollars.

One of the nine-foot tusks of the mastodon unearthed at Farmington, Conn., last September, has been uncovered by workmen who were enlarging the original hole from which the mastodon's bones were taken. Experts from Peabody museum, Yale, express confidence that its mate will be found close by. This gigantic ivory tusk measures nine feet along the outside curve, twenty-three and one half inches in circumference, eight inches in diameter at the base, and tapers to a point. It is in an excelent state of preservation.

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