News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Oct 1, 1914

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— Work on Chicago’s new union depot was begun September 20. The cost will be about $50,000,000. The project will furnish employment for 10,000 men, and the number employed will at certain stages of the construction reach as high as 25,000 men. The time set for the completion of this building is five years, and work must be rushed in order to finish it in that time. The city will get $800,000 as compensation for the streets and alleys which have had to be vacated for the new building.

— St. Petersburg is no more! Not because it has been captured by the enemy, but because the form of the word is German rather than Slavic. By order of the czar it is henceforth to be called Petrograd. The Teutonic names of other Russian cities will be Slavicized in a similar fashion. We hope they will all be as pronounceable as Petrograd.

— The Baldwin Locomotive Works has just constructed for the Erie the largest locomotive hitherto made. It has a traction power of 160,000 pounds, and the weight on the driving wheels is 753,000 pounds, and the total weight is 845,050 pounds. It is 261,000 pounds heavier than any other locomotive in existence. It can draw 25,000 tons on the level.

— It is reported that the famous cathedral of Notre Dame, at Rheims, has been destroyed in the bombardment of the city by German artillery. It is regarded as the greatest loss from a historical and artistic sense of the present war. Begun on the site of an earlier church erected by Robert de Courcy in 1212 and continued at intervals down to the fifteenth century, it has been described as “the most perfect example in grandeur and grace of Gothic style in existence.”

— At least seventy-two men, women, and children, coastwise passengers and crew, were drowned September 18, when the three-masted steam schooner “Francis H. Leggett” was pounded to pieces in a gale sixty miles from the mouth of the Columbia River. Two men were rescued by passing steamers and carried to Astoria and Portland to tell how the sea tore the vessel to pieces, and how the passengers were drowned a boatload at a time, as the lifeboats put off, or met their fate a little later when the vessel turned over and sank.

— After three years of negotiation, the United States is to acquire ownership of the entire Presidential Range of the White Mountains and 84,355 acres of land. This will give to the White Mountain Reservation nearly 120,000 acres of thick forests, beautiful lakes, high mountains, and marvelous scenery. In addition to Mt. Washington, the range includes Clay, Jefferson, and Adams, of the northern group, and Monroe, Franklin, and Pleasant, of the southern chain. Aside from the mountains and other forests, the deal is important in that it will give to the government absolute control of three of the largest New England rivers, the Saco, the Androscoggin, and the Connecticut, all of which draw their largest supply from the mountains.

— Twelve months’ famine, which only outside aid can avert, faces the Kwangtung and Kwang-si provinces of China, which were devastated by flood in July, with a loss of 3,000 lives and more than 100,000 homes. Consul General Cheshire reported from Canton that more than 8,000,000 persons suffered losses, and many millions in distress would need food until the next harvest. American missionaries report that in many places whole villages have been blotted out, inhabitants and all. The loss of life may never be known, but the suffering caused is appalling. At the end of July the West River was still very high; the fields and lands were under several feet of water. Banks required rebuilding, houses reerecting, fields to be pumped dry for planting.