Notes of News | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 17, 1879

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 53, No. 16.

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Notes of News.

—An insect is at work destroying the orange groves of Louisiana.

—The pope has declined to accept Archbishop Purcell’s resignation.

—12,000 looms at Blackburn, England, have stopped, and 5,000 weavers are idle.

—There is a good understanding between the Vatican and the German empire.

—Vast beds of superior magnetic iron ore have been discovered in Lehigh county, Pa.

—A colossal bronze statue of Livingstone, 8 feet 6 inches high, has lately been unveiled in Glasgow.

—A fire in Miragoane, Hayti, April 4, rendered 5,000 or 6,000 persons homeless. The loss is about $1,000,000.

—During 1878, 471 persons were saved from wrecks or from vessels in distress by the lifeboats on the coast of Great Britain.

—Queen Victoria, who is traveling on the continent, has received an autograph letter from the pope, welcoming her to Italy.

—The famine in Upper Egypt, which was caused by overtaxation, has ceased, but has left disastrous consequences. 10,000 persons died by starvation alone.

—The Senate has passed a bill for the construction of a refrigerating vessel, to be used for the disinfection of ships and cargoes coming from yellow-fever ports.

—Hon. Andrew D. White, President of Cornell University, has been nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate as Minister to Germany, to succeed the late Bayard Taylor.

—A Jewish ex-rabbi, near Berlin, has celebrated his iron wedding on the seventieth anniversary of his marriage. He is in his 93d year, and 69 of his 145 descendants attended the festival.

—During a heavy thunder storm at three o’clock on the morning of March 24, the Roman Catholic Convent in Cairo, Ill., was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. No one was injured.

—The Tremont House at Claremont, N. H., was totally destroyed by fire on the 20th of March, and five persons were burned to death. There were forty persons in the house at the time, some of whom were injured in jumping from the windows of the burning building.

—A contractor of Marseilles has just obtained a concession for the extraction of chlorate of potash from the Dead Sea. The process of producing it will, besides, furnish other valuable chemical substances, such as the bromide and iodide of potassium.

—General Garibaldi has gone to Rome. It is said his visit has no political significance, but that the veteran general has probably gone there to die. Sick, and worn out with his journey, he was borne to the house of his son on a mattress, followed by a multitude of silent but admiring friends.

—The Chinese are about to build large cotton and woolen factories, the former at Shanghai, and the latter at Tientsin, where sheep are numerous, and their fleeces can be had for the gathering. The Herald says these factories “will hurt America more than our 15-man travesty of legislation could hurt China.”

—An English writer, reviewing the facts of the war in South Africa, concludes that if the money which has already been spent in conquering the Zulus had been applied to their improvement, it would have civilized tens of thousands of them, and made them a source of wealth to the colonies and to England also.

—The greatest consternation has been caused in the town of Reading, Mass., by the discovery that Nathan P. Pratt, treasurer of a savings bank in that town, is a defaulter to the amount of $90,000, and that while enjoying the fullest confidence of the community he has for years been engaged in a systematic robbery of the bank.

—France is experimenting with an electric automatic flood-warner, which is designed to reproduce from a higher point to a lower one a river’s variations in level. It is so constructed that when the rise of water forebodes danger, bells are rung in the houses, thus warning the inhabitants and giving them time to escape.

—A missionary, after thirty years of service in India in building school-houses, largely with his own hands, complains that on returning to America he finds churches in large cities which cost $200,000 and $500,000, and a secretary of his own Foreign Board receiving a salary of $5,000 a year, when, he says, the oldest mission in India “is really dying out for lack of men and means.”

—We have the strange news from India that Colonel Olcott, who went with others from this city last December to further relations between the Theosophical Society and the Arya Samaj, has been offered by wealthy natives in Bombay a tabernacle in which he might conduct a revival of Buddhism. If this offer is accepted, it will be a sad sight—an American citizen preaching heathenism in one of the great cities of India!

—At the beginning of this century the Jews in Jerusalem did not exceed 300, but in the past ten years, owing to the removal of restrictions, the influx has been great. Nearly all the old houses, as they became vacant, have been bought by them, and a great many new ones have been built in all parts of the town. Schools, hospitals, and religious associations have been started, and the population has increased to over 13,000.

—Bishop Pennick, who is doing brave pioneer work in the Protestant Episcopal mission on the West Coast of Africa, does not express a high opinion of the usual style of intelligence sent home from heathen missions. He thinks that what is given to the public is too decidedly rose-colored and is selected with a view of keeping up the spirits of contributors. Perhaps his judgment is too sweeping, but he certainly sets an example of candor in describing his own mission, as, for example: “I have found that much which appears pious is simply cant, a mere language learned in the mission schools, without any character to back it up. There is a pitiable want of sincerity long after there is an astonishing pretense of piety.” While speaking thus bluntly, the bishop works like a hero.