NOTES OF NEWS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 31, 1878

NOTES OF NEWS.

—On June 3, a fire was raging in the capital of Burmah, and 2000 houses had been destroyed.

—The largest wholesale dry goods firm in St. Louis, that of Dodd, Brown, & Co., has failed. Liabilities from $1,250,000 to $1,500,000.

—A dispatch from Paris says that Oct. 21 the River Ligue rose 64 feet, flooding a large portion of the town of Largentière.

—The damage done by the inundation on the Damietta branch of the Nile is estimated at $2,500,000; 250 lives have been lost.

—It is estimated that the financial loss to that portion of the South which was visited by the yellow fever is $200,000,000.

—In view of the serious Indian situation and new controversies in relation to Turkey, as the London Times thinks, the British cabinet was summoned to meet Oct. 25.

—The American Home Missionary Society is now nearly $30,000 in arrears to its missionaries. October is bringing in heavy additional claims.

—In view of the prevalence of hog cholera at the West, the Chicago Tribune advises people to abstain from all forms of swine flesh as the only sure mode of escape.

—Beecher said Sunday, “The old ten commandments belong to a barbaric state.” Some people who have never said so act as if they believed it.

—Memphis rejoices in the deposition of the yellow fiend, and the city is rapidly filling up with returned refugees and strangers. The fever is everywhere disappearing.

—The St. Petersburg Golos declares that, although England may seek redress from the Ameer, if she be victorious the fate of Afghanistan must not be decided without the consent of Russia.

—It is thought that England’s proposed advance into Afghanistan will be postponed on account of the fever that is steadily increasing among the troops stationed at Jamrood and encamped on the frontier.

—A dispatch from London, dated Oct. 22, is to the effect that the Ameer has been induced to take his present course by substantial offers from the Russian envoy.

—Reports from Yankton, Dakota, Oct. 7, state that a very destructive prairie fire traversed from fifteen to twenty counties between Jim River and Missouri River. Great damage is done in some of the settlements.

—According to a recent statement of Kwang Chang Ling, an educated Chinese statesman, the entire population of China does not now exceed 120,000,000, instead of being 450,000,000, as it has been usually reckoned.

—Decatur and Edwards counties, in Sappa Valley, Kan., recently raided by the Cheyenne Indians, have been devastated by prairie fires, and nearly everything not destroyed by the Indians consumed. Several persons are said to have perished in the flames.

—Three volcanoes,—Cotopaxi, in Equador, Ætna, in the island of Sicily, and Vesuvius, in Italy,—are now in full blaze together. The simultaneous eruption of three great volcanoes is a rare circumstance, one which does not occur in centuries.

—A Biblical curiosity in the English section of the Paris Exhibition which attracts crowds, is a model of the tabernacle as it rested during the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert. The exterior is constructed in strict accordance with the details given in the Old Testament.

—The island of Socotra, in the Indian Ocean, 100 miles from Aden another British station at the mouth of the Red Sea, has become an integral portion of the empire on which the sun never sets. Socotra is a bold, picturesque island, equal in area to the State of Rhode Island.

—President Washburn, of Robert College, Constantinople, writes to the Independent that thus far the result of the fall of Turkey has been chaos. “Many parts of the country,” he says, “are ruins—the towns burned, the inhabitants massacred or scattered. Everywhere the population has been reduced to poverty, and all business has long been at a standstill. In many provinces civil war is still raging between the different nationalities, and all civil government has long since disappeared. The central government at Constantinople is in much the same condition. The sultan trembles for his life, the treasury is empty and bankrupt, the old system of government has come to an end, and those in power do not see what is to take its place.”

—The city of Glasgow merits our pity as the scene of the biggest banking-rascality yet. The conspiracy among the directors of the bank by which a deficit of $20,000,000 was kept covered beneath a bubble, so long, with, of course, utter disaster close at hand at any unlucky moment, was an astonishing fact. It is painful to think of the wide-reaching ruin and distress occasioned by the failure. Something very like a panic has spread through the commercial circles of Great Britain. Many who thought themselves rich suddenly find themselves poor; thousands are thrown out of employment; other thousands are forced to labor for diminished wages. But it is some satisfaction to learn that Scotch justice is not a nullity or a mockery. The six directors have been arrested, and in “their own place,” behind prison bars, are meditating upon the dishonesties and cruelties of which they are guilty.—Advance.

—Oct. 28, a fearful storm of wind and rain swept over the East, traveling through Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. There was a wholesale destruction of property in the city of Philadelphia; great church spires were swept down, in their fall carrying everything with them; 40 churches in all were injured; market houses, railway depots, and dwellings were unroofed, and bridges were carried away; nearly 100 warehouses along the river front were wrecked and flooded. At Chester 70 dwellings and stores were unroofed. In the track of the storm, farms were destroyed, cattle killed, and in numerous cases there was loss of human life. Other towns through which the storm passed tell the same story. On the water there was wholesale destruction of property, with appalling loss of human life. The storm was more destructive to life and vessels in the Chesapeake and the Virginia rivers than any that has been known for years, hundreds of sail vessels and steamers being wrecked in them. Along the coast of the Atlantic, an oyster fleet of 100 sail were all lost or badly damaged. Several steamers were wrecked or foundered, with but few survivors, and one ship is known to have taken down every soul on board.