SECULAR NEWS | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 1, 1878

SECULAR NEWS.

—The grain crops of Utah are the largest ever raised in that Territory.

—The common string telephone has been in use in East India from time immemorial.

—Nearly 5,700,000 immigrants have arrived in this country since 1847, 4,000,000 of them being German and Irish.

—A famine is reported in the State of Sonora and Sinaloa, Mexico. At Mazatlan, there is no flour, and people are emigrating.

—The cost of the construction of the Paris exhibition buildings and grounds is now estimated at 45,300,000 francs, or $9,060,000.

—Latest letters from the English Universities Mission in Central Africa, state that the Zanzibar slave trade has virtually ceased.

—There were 2,470 failures in the United States during the last three months, with $48,753,000 liabilities, against 3,355, with $82,078,000 liabilities during the first three months of the year.

—The value of the exports from the United States last year exceeded the imports to the amount of $251,000,000. During the last four years we have exported nearly $600,000,000 worth of merchandise more than we have imported.

—The public debt of the United States reached its highest point in August 1865 and then amounted to $2,756,431,671.43. The debt less cash in the Treasury June 1, 1878, was $2,033,637,450.84, thus showing an aggregate reduction of $722,794,120.79.

—Letters from St. Petersburg state that there are at least 50,000 sick soldiers in the Russian armies of Europe and Asia. Typhoid, small-pox and dysentery are the principal maladies. Surgeons are very scarce. Sixty-two are reported lately as having died, and one hundred have reached home broken in health.

—The American schooner Parallel, on her way from San Francisco to Portland, boarded a Japanese vessel on which was found no living person, but only a number of dead bodies of Orientals who seemed to have been dead for some time. As there was no food on board they are supposed to have died from starvation.

—An exchange says: "Staten island is a picture of desolation, the contrast between the present aspect and that of last year being most marked. Only a few persons are cultivating any portion of the island, potatoes being the only crop cultivated at all. The levees have been repaired, and are believed to be stronger than ever before."