Natives of the Solomon Islands are very quick at perceiving distant objects, such as ships at sea, and will pick out birds concealed in dense foliage some sixty or seventy feet high. Shepherds and sailors are blessed with good sight; the Eskimo will detect a white fox in the snow a great distance away, while the Arabs of the deserts of Arabia have such extreme powers of vision that on the vast plains of the desert they will pick out objects invisible to the ordinary eye at ranges from one to ten miles distant. Among civilized peoples, the Norwegians have better eyesight than most, if not all, others, as they more generally fulfill the necessary conditions. The reason why defective eyes are so much on the increase in this and many European countries lies in too much study of books in early life, and in badly lighted rooms. THE NEWS OF ALL NATIONS. Big Indiana Gas Well. A gas well which gives more than 12,000,000 feet volume has been drilled in half a mile from Linton, Ind., on the Gillett farm. It is the largest gusher in the central States. Missouri River’s Jokes with Farmers. Suppose that, years ago when you were a young man, you came to Missouri and bought a farm on the banks of the Missouri River, and spent the next fifteen or twenty years in clearing the land and bringing it into a high state of cultivation. And then suppose that, just when you had begun to derive some benefit from your years of toil, the river should suddenly reach out and swallow up about half your farm. Then suppose that the river, after keeping your farm for several years, should grow seemingly repentant and replace your farm, you would no doubt feel that all the land within the bounds mentioned in your deeds was your own as much as it ever was. But that would all depend on the precise manner in which the river replaced your land. That is where the accretion law of Missouri comes in, and it is a fearful and mysterious thing. If the river, in putting your land back, began piling it up against your bank and continued doing so, the land to the water’s edge would be yours, even if it went beyond your original boundaries. But if the river, as it often does, should first throw up a bar out in the channel and then gradually fill up the space between that and your land until finally the current changed and left the island thus formed joined to your land, you would have no claim to any land thus formed. It would belong to the county, and could be surveyed and sold to the highest bidder, and the money it brought would go to the school fund. The Missouri River is a malicious stream, and if it ever comes to judgment, will have a lot to answer for. Instead of pursuing its course in an orderly manner and sticking to one established course, it is forever changing, eating away the bank on one side and throwing up new banks on the other side, cutting out old sand bars here and building new ones there, so that the main channel is never the same for very long at a time.