News and Miscellany

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 5, 1875

News and Miscellany.

—The French residents of New York, have contributed $5,000 in aid of their countrymen in France who have suffered by the recent floods.

MADRID, July 23.—The Constitutional Committee yesterday adopted the article of the proposed Constitution establishing religious toleration.

—A mail was received in San Francisco, July 31, which was but fifteen days in coming from London here, and but fourteen days from Dublin. This is the fastest time on record. All of which goes to show that the Old World is rapidly approaching the western shores of the New.

—Dispatches dated Knoxville, July 31, announce the death of Ex-President Andrew Johnson. The cause was paralysis. He desired that his winding sheet should be the flag of his country. Of his death the New York Post says, ten years ago his death would have agitated the country to its depths; to-day it makes scarcely a ripple on the surface of the political arena.

—The only colored graduate of Harvard College (Richard T. Greener) distinguished himself both as a speaker and as a writer, won more prizes than any classmate or coeval, was an excellent scholar in some departments, was on terms of intimacy with the best persons in his class, and left a record of memory every way honorable. He has now a professorship of logic in the university of South Carolina, and were all our academic chairs as well filled, it would indicate an educational standard very far above the average of our (so called) colleges and universities.—Dr. Peabody.

—A terrible ice storm visited Geneva, Switzerland, on the night of July 7. The hail came in an almost solid sheet of ice, demolishing street lamps, smashing in, not only the glass, but the whole windows, sash and all, filling rooms with fragments of ice which at once compacted themselves into a solid mass. It totally ruined the vegetable gardens, upon which a large portion of the poor people depend for a livelihood. Vast numbers of small birds were killed by the storm, and bodies of several foxes have been found.

—The failure of the delegation to Washington, and the increased incursions of lawless whites, together with the cruel frauds of the agents in issuing rations, have thoroughly aroused the Sioux, who are now beginning to make serious work with the miners in the Black Hills. A letter to the Omaha Herald from the Red Cloud Agency states that on the 9th inst. a well-armed and well-equipped body of Uncapapa Sioux were on the war-path in the Black Hills, with the avowed determination to cover the country with horses' hoof-tracks. From Indian sources we learn that they have had two encounters with white men (miners), and killed seven of one party that they met and three of another.

FAMINE IN ICELAND.

Further accounts of the earthquake in Iceland, and its effects upon the crops and pasturage, state that famine is imminent among a large part of the inhabitants. Two hundred square miles of the island is covered with lava. From a description of the event by the Rev. Dean Sigard Gunnarsson, a resident of the devastated district, we take the following:—

“On Easter Monday, early in the morning, loud rumbling noises were heard to the westward, and apparently traveled toward the northeast. Presently the sounds turned backward. The air was heavy and jet black toward the north and northeast. About 9 o'clock whitish-gray scoriaceous sand began to fall from the sky, the particles averaging the size of a grain, but in shape longer. The dark column moved on nearer and nearer, and the darkness rapidly increased, while the scoriaceous hail thickened at the same rate. A full hour before noon candles had to be lighted in the houses, and at noon the darkness was as dense as that of a windowless house. *

“For four consecutive hours it was necessary to have lighted candles in the house. During that time the ashes and sand were falling thick and fast. Lightning and claps of thunder were at the same time seen and heard in rapid succession, and everything seemed to tremble again. The air was charged with electricity to such an extent that pinnacles and staff-spikes of iron when turned in the air seemed all ablaze.”

When the darkness passed away it was discovered that the surface of the island to an extent of nearly 3,000 square miles had been covered with a layer of ashes and scoriæ from one and a half to eight inches deep. In many places pumice boulders as large as the fist had fallen. The ashes came down hot with a sulphurous smell, but both heat and odor were soon dissipated.

Before the fall of the ashes, the fields were snowless and the pasturage, plentiful; but after it not a creature could be let out of doors, and the sheep, if let out, would run as if mad, in all directions.

As the pasturage was destroyed, and as it was upon that that the sheep and cattle lived, famine stared the inhabitants in the face. The result has been that the people, hastily abandoning their homes, have fled into the neighboring districts, which, though untouched by the eruption, are but scantily provisioned, and so the overcrowding threatens starvation to all. It is to save the Icelanders from this impending calamity that the cry goes up from the chief men of Reykjavik for help. In England, subscriptions are received by the Lord Mayor of London.