p. 103 | Notes of News

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 27, 1879

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 53, No. 13.

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Notes of News.

—Tennessee has elected a lady its State Librarian.

—The German Reichstag will not be dissolved until autumn.

—President Grevy has granted amnesty to 151 communists, including some of the worst of them.

—The liabilities of Archbishop Purcell are at least $6,000,000, and may exceed this sum.

—The Jewish Times computes the number of Jews all over the world to be 6,503,000.

—Nine-tenths of the 99 criminals in the Ohio Penitentiary for life, owe their imprisonment to whisky.

—A dispatch from Calcutta, dated March 18, states that a great fire was raging in Rangoon that day.

—The Portuguese explorer, Pinto, has arrived at the Transvaal, having traversed Africa from west to east.

—The Irish Presbyterian Church has just lost a gift of $50,000 through its repugnance to what it regards as ritualism.

—The Baptist churches in Sweden have increased from 9 with 476 members in 1855, to 253 with nearly 14,000 members.

—The Sultan of Turkey ratified the Russo-Turkish treaty on the 10th inst., and exchanged congratulations with the Czar.

—There are 1,542 theaters in Europe, of which Italy has 348, France 337, Germany 191, Spain 168, Austria 152, and England 150.

—In a single day in the first week of March, over 3,000 persons passed through Kansas City, Missouri, seeking new homes in the West.

—During last year 327,813 volumes of fiction were drawn from two free libraries in Liverpool, while only 113,391 volumes on all other subjects were drawn.

—The United States is to have 40,000 square feet of space in the International Exhibition to be opened in Sydney, Australia, the first week in September.

—The Northern Pacific Railroad has been running its trains over the Missouri river at Bismarck on rails laid on the ice, a bridge for which they cannot secure a patent.

—It is believed that the newly-invented microphone may be utilized by detecting and announcing the subterranean explosions in volcanic districts which immediately precede earthquake shocks.

—The damage by the recent flood at Szegedin, Hungary, is estimated at £1,500,000; 2,000 farmhouses have been destroyed. It is believed the waters will not entirely have subsided before July.

—An ingenious Meriden mechanic has made a perfect steam-engine, the works of silver and gold, which only weighs fifteen grains; and three drops of water, when heated into steam, will drive it twenty minutes.

—Islands have repeatedly appeared near Sicily, through volcanic submarine action, and have disappeared again, within the last century. In 1783 the island of Nynoe rose above the sea off Iceland, and sank at the end of a year.

—James Freeman Clarke puts the Chinese question in few words very well in saying that in this country if a man is black we enslave him, if he is red we steal his land, and if he is yellow we will not let him come at all.

—Telegraphic rumors from Pekin point to the possibility of war with Russia. St. Petersburg is as confident that this is the result of British intrigue as London is that Russia is backing Afghanistan in the existing unpleasantness.

—At the opening of the Democratic 46th Congress in special session, March 18, it was commonly remarked, by both Democrats and Republicans: “Well, the Confederacy has captured the capital at last.”

—It is stated that in consequence of the shattered condition of the Pontifical finances, and the falling off of the offerings of the faithful, an attempt is being made, under the auspices of the confraternity of St Peter, to give a new impulse to the collection of Peter’s pence.

—After a recent storm in Reading and Allentown, Pa., a strange yellowish deposit resembling sulphur was found on the ground. In some places it was half an inch deep. It had the color and smell of sulphur, and burned as readily, emitting the same fume.

—St. Petersburg, March 18. The Golos states it is more than probable that Russia has notified Turkey of her intention to leave troops south of the Balkans until she is guaranteed against the payment of the war indemnity being prejudiced by the terms of the projected Turkish loan.

—At the recent sale of the Brinley library in New York, which comprised an extraordinary number of antique and curious books, one of John Eliot’s Indian Bibles, of which only a few copies are extant, was sold for $1000, and a perfect copy of “The Bay Psalm-Book,” printed at Cambridge in 1640, was sold for $1,200.

—An estimable young man, the husband of a young wife, was killed in Cincinnati a few days ago, by the careless use of a pistol in the hands of a party of men who were intoxicated, and insisted on firing into the street. He was returning from a business trip East, and had just alighted from the cars at the time of the accident.

—A correspondent of the Christian Weekly says that the gauge invented by Mr. Richards of Philadelphia to measure the 20,000th part of an inch, is behind the time, as he saw in Moravia, N. Y., in 1870, a gauge invented by a workman in the Philadelphia Mint, which would measure the 160,000th part of an inch!

—The Peabody Donation Fund in London, according to the 14th annual report of its trustees, amounts to £699,131, of which £540,948 has been expended. By it 5,170 rooms have been provided for the artisan and laboring poor of that city, comprising 2,348 separate dwellings, occupied by 9,860 persons. The average weekly rent of each dwelling is 4s., 4d.

—The Missionary Herald states that after one of the secretaries of the American Board had recently alluded in a discourse to the change wrought by the gospel in the Fiji Islands, a stranger told him that in 1846, when a boy, he was present at a cannibal feast on one of those islands, presided over by the king. Six years later he united with an assembly of 3,000 Christian worshipers on that same spot, and heard the king publicly avow his reception of Christianity.

—A schism has sprung up in the Greek Orthodox Church which promises to be serious. The Greek government, after allowing it to exist undisturbed for the last five years, has sent officers to take the children from its schools and to close the churches, while all the clergy who have joined the movement have been ordered to retire to a monastery, where they will be subjected to severe penance. The leader of this new party is one Makrakis, who preaches about “restored Christendom,” and proposes a reform within the existing church which shall restore the conditions that prevailed from the first to the third centuries.

—There was considerable excitement in the Reichstag on Monday, March 17, while that body discussed the report explanatory of the action of the government in instituting a petty state of siege in Berlin. Herr Liebknecht, Socialist, strongly censured the measure. He declared that his party is a party of reform, not revolution; he also defended the course of the Socialist deputies in not rising from their seats when cheers were given for the Emperor. Herr Liebknecht remarked, “If a republic is established in Germany,”—but he was unable to finish the sentence on account of the uproar. The President of the Reichstag censured Liebknecht’s course, and threatened to deprive him of his right of speech. Count Von Eulenberg explained that the government’s reason for proclaiming a state of siege was that Berlin was in great danger because it was the home of the Socialist agitation. Referring to what he termed the “assassination and murder epidemic,” he said investigation showed that the instruments of crime were prepared in Berlin and East Prussia.