SECULAR NEWS | AdventAI

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

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 3, No. 10.

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SECULAR NEWS.

—The king of Italy gets nearly $3,000,000 a year and wants more.

—Paris is to have a net-work of underground railways like those of London.

—Nearly 2,000 people are fed daily at the Washington and Fulton Market soup house in New York.

—Queen Victoria gave away 812 gifts, valued at $15,000, to the poor of Windsor on New Year's day.

—Grand Duke Alexis and suite arrived in New York on Saturday, the 20th.

—During the month of January, fifty-three American vessels were wrecked, with heavy loss of life and property.

—A Calcutta dispatch reports fifty persons killed at Ahmedabad by a gunpowder explosion, and 1,000 wounded.

—A man in New York acknowledges that he and his partner make $15,000 per annum in re-coloring old and musty teas.

—There are about 70,000 bee-keepers in the United States, and these send to market about 15,000,000 pounds of honey and wax yearly.

—Gortschakoff, the Russian prime minister, is seventy-eight years old, and has seen fifty-seven years of unremitting service for his government.

—A boy recently died in England who weighed 350 pounds. He was twelve years and four months old, was five feet high, and measured nearly six feet around the waist. So says a usually reliable exchange.

—Statistical returns of the product of vines in France for the year 1876 show that the vintage has fallen off exactly one-half from that of 1875. This reduction was caused by the ravages of the phylloxera.

—In San Francisco during the year 1876, there were 481 deaths from diphtheria. Salem, Oregon, goes far ahead of San Francisco in this respect, there having been in that city, during the last two months, 700 cases of diphtheria.

—The pineapple is cultivated extensively in the East Indies, where the leaves are converted into a kind of wadding, used for upholstering purposes, instead of hair, and into a sort of flannel, of which substantial shirts and coats are made.

—The London School Board, by a majority of two to one, have advised the establishment of a school for truants, to which, with the parents' consent, habitual truants may be committed for a period varying from six days to one month. The plan has been in successful operation in Hamburg, and, it is said, has been introduced.

—Six tons of gold in $20 gold pieces, the whole being worth $3,000,000, arrived in New York, a few weeks since, from San Francisco, and was deposited in the New York Sub-Treasury. The gold was contained in fourteen iron safes, and was guarded by Captain George F. Prince, of the Fifth Cavalry, and eight selected men, besides eighteen clerks of the Treasury Department. Why not have some of this in circulation?

—The Commercial Advertiser, speaking of the small-pox epidemic in London, calls attention to the fact that the number of deaths from small-pox in the Jewish community in London has been but two during the last three months. And adds, “The same exemption from epidemic diseases has always been noticed among the Jews in all countries, and it is attributed to their clean habits and judicious mode of living, which has preserved some of the traditional customs proved sound by experience.”

—The building of the great railway from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico was a colossal feat in constructive engineering. It is 267½ miles long, has eighteen lengthy tunnels, and many fine iron bridges. It cost the sum of 40,000,000 Mexican dollars, and is said to be the finest constructed railway on the American continent. It crosses three distinct ranges of mountains, the grades being 400 feet per mile. As the ordinary American locomotive finds great difficulty in crossing unencumbered, the company use an English engine—known as the Farley patent, which carries ten loaded cars with ease.

“The Inspectors of the Pennsylvania Western District Penitentiary,” says the Christian at Work, “now propose a forward step in reform by not merely increasing the accommodations of the prison, but by providing an ‘Annex’ at a distance from it, which admits a classification of the prisoners, which is now impossible. They propose to separate old and hardened offenders from novices in crime, and those committed for the first time, and those who have been led into crime by bad associations and circumstances they were not strong enough to resist. It is also proposed to admit prisoners to the ‘Annex’ for good behavior, while the fear of being sent back to the old prison will be a constant restraint. The inmates of the ‘Annex’ will be regarded as improvable, and special efforts will be made to effect their entire reformation. This plan has been tried with success in Ireland, Belgium, and Denmark.”