SECULAR NEWS | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 1, 1877

SECULAR NEWS.

—For two cents a postal card will go to all parts of Europe.

—A letter can now be sent round the world in seventy-eight days.

—Three thousand miners in Alleghany valley are on a strike for higher wages.

—The Russian government has ordered the preparation of 150 railway carriages for the transportation of sick and wounded. What does that mean?

—The Philadelphia Ledger and Transcript records the death of ten persons in that vicinity, in 1876, who were from one hundred to one hundred and two years of age.

—An Eastern exchange says: “The lawyers in San Francisco are wearing crape on the left arm for thirty days, as an evidence of their grief at the settlement of the Lick estate without litigation.”

It has been estimated by the President of the New York State Working Men's Assembly that there are at the present time 45,375 men in New York city who are able and willing to work, but can find no employment.

—The Centennial chime of bells which attracted so much attention during the Exhibition, has been sold to Mrs. A. T. Stewart, of New York city, for the Stewart Memorial Church, at Garden city, Long Island. The church will be the finest on the continent.

—Italy has declared its universities open to women. The like action has been taken by Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. A ministerial order has been issued in Holland opening every university and gymnasium to women. France has opened the Sorbonne to women, and Russia its schools of medicine and surgery.

—A dispatch from Vienna, Jan. 20, announces a tremendous land slide in the vicinity of Steinbruck, Austria. It is stated that two million meters (a metre is about 39 inches) of earth have fallen, and that the railroad is covered to a depth of fifty feet for seven hundred yards, and will be blocked for weeks. Two houses containing families are still buried.

—One hundred thousand dollars of George Peabody's gift to Yale College has been used in the erection of the fire-proof museum. The sum of $20,000 has been set apart as a reserve fund for the completion of the building, and the income of $30,000 is available for the care of the museum, and the increase of its collections. Mr. Peabody's entire gift was $150,000.

—More than three millions of dollars are now expended annually for education in Japan. There are no less than 18,700 common schools, fifty-one normal schools, and twenty-one government colleges; and not less than 400,000 girls are in attendance upon the public schools. Voluntary gifts of over a million dollars a year, from the rich men of the country, have been made to carry on this school system, so intensely interested in it are the thinking people of the land. The population of Japan is 33,580,000.

—Over five millions of the American people are unable to read and write, mostly foreigners and freedmen. In South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi this is the condition of more than half the population. When five millions confess themselves unable to read and write, we may safely infer that the acquirements of at least another few millions in this direction are so limited as to be of little practical use. The illiteracy of this large body of men and women is a constant source of weakness and danger to themselves and to the Republic. The school-master has a great work to do in America.

SENDING PORTRAITS BY TELEGRAPH.—A Paris correspondent of the London Standard writes: “It has often been said that the science of telegraphy is as yet only in its infancy. What it will be when it reaches the age of maturity it would be difficult to say with certainty, but some idea may be formed from an extraordinary telegraphic discovery just made in Paris. It appears that some inventor has found out the means of sending portraits by telegraph. The modus operandi has not yet been disclosed, but experiments have been made, and—if we are to believe the papers—with complete success.”

—Our rifle and revolver manufacturers are making a good thing out of the threatening aspect of affairs between Russia and Turkey; both countries are eagerly buying their firearms. By the Colt machinery bought by General Gorloff already 3,000,000 rifles have been turned out; Russia has imported 100,000 Smith & Wesson revolvers and 20,000,000 cartridges, to say nothing of the 400,000 cartridges manufactured daily in Russia by American machines. Meanwhile Turkey has contracted in Rhode Island for 800,000 Martini-Henry rifles, of which 250,000 have already been shipped, and 100,000 more are ready for export.

—According to Behm's statistical tables, the population of the world in 1876 was 1,423,917,000, the average density being 28 people to the square mile. Europe has 309,178,300; Asia, 824,548,500; Africa, 199,921,600; Australasia, 4,748,660; and America, 85,519,850. The increase over 1875 is about 27,000,000—an increase due, in a great measure, to the result of recent censuses and a more accurate knowledge of regions hitherto imperfectly known. Mexico is given 9,276,079 souls; the Central American States, 2,828,164; and the West Indies, 4,316,178. There are about 215 cities in the world that have, or are estimated to have, 100,000 inhabitants or more. Twenty-nine of them are credited with a population of 500,000 or more, and 9 have 1,000,000 inhabitants or more, to wit: London, 3,489,428; Paris, 1,851,793; New York (but including Brooklyn), 1,535,622; Vienna, 1,091,999; Berlin, 1,044,000; and Canton, Seangtan, Shanchowfu and Singanfu, 1,000,000 each.