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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · December 17, 1867

News and Miscellany.

Can ye not discern the Signs of the Times? Matt. xvi, 3.

—Mount Vesuvius is still sending forth pillars of fire from the old and newly formed craters, and the display is magnificent. There are seven streams of lava in full flow.

—The track of the Central Pacific Railroad is laid from Cisco to Summit, and through the great tunnel, over 7,000 feet above the sea. The first passenger car went through the tunnel Saturday. On the east side of the mountains, 24 miles of track are laid, and a fortnight's open weather will close the gap of six miles, making connection with Lower Truckee, 130 miles east of Sacramento.

—THE Pope, when visiting a wounded captain in Rome, saw a musket in his room, and at once asked whether it was a Chassepot. On being answered in the affirmative, the Holy Father took the gun in his hand, examined it with intense interest, and asked to have the mechanism explained to him. What a subject for a picture for the next international exhibition—the Pope with the tiara on his head going through the manual and platoon exercise in a fit of ecstatic admiration of the last great prop of the temporal power—the fusil Chassepot!

—It used to take a year to hear from China and Japan. The mails from China and Japan which left Yokohama by the steamship, Great Republic, October 25, via Wells, Fargo & Co.'s Express, arrived via Chicago, in New York on Thursday. This is but forty-one days from Japan, and only fifteen days between San Francisco and New York.

—A paper was lately read before a Medical Society in England containing evidence to prove that the form of nervous blindness known by the name of amaurosis is frequently produced by excess in tobacco smoking. The subject was recommended to the serious attention of the profession.

—MR. SPURGEON says that for years he has preached eight or ten times a week, besides issuing the weekly sermon, editing the magazine, overseeing the church, superintending the college, directing the orphanage, founding new churches, attending committees, and a thousand other things; but many signs indicate that there must be a pause; and he adds: “I am not less willing, but I am far less able than I was to serve the church by preaching.”

—Prince Napoleon is about leaving Paris for Manzan in Northern Italy, where he will meet his father-in-law, King Victor Emanuel.