SECULAR NEWS | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 18, 1878

SECULAR NEWS.

—Mexico has 3,000 miles of sea and gulf coast.

—The number of voters in Great Britain is 2,909,977.

—There are said to be 100,000 Scandinavians living in this country at the present time.

—The United States Government warehouse at Fort Lincoln, was burned July 14. Loss, $100,000.

—Texas claims to have three millions of inhabitants, and to be the third now in population and the first in size among all the States of the Union.

—Diaz has pronounced against a railway connecting Mexico with the United States, and refuses to admit the contract agreed upon by his predecessors.

—July 11, the boiler of a threshing engine working on a ranch three miles from Grayson, Stanislaus county, exploded killing one man and wounding others.

—Half the required £1,000 has been raised towards a martyrs' memorial at Stratford, England, where eighteen martyrs suffered death in the years 1555 and 1556.

—London covers 700 square miles and contains 4,000,000 inhabitants. It contains more Jews than the whole of Palestine, more Roman Catholics than Rome itself, more Irish than Dublin, and more Scotchmen than Edinburgh.

—The railroads of the United States have in use 3,500,000 car wheels. Those on fast passenger trains are renewed every ten months; but freight cars use the same wheel sometimes ten years. The average life of a wheel is 50,000 miles, and at that rate it takes 700,000 a year at a cost, less the old wheels, of $6,000,000.

—The socialists of New York held a mass meeting Monday evening, June 24, to commemorate the French Revolution of 1848. About 1,500 people were present. The speeches were moderate in tone, but some of the inscriptions on the numerous red flags were by no means peaceful—one of them being, "Bread or Lead."

—As showing the cost of labor in Europe, the rate of wages paid on certain railroad works of the same class was: In Portugal, $1.54 a week; in Ireland, $2.20; in France, $2.90, and in England, $5.30. Nevertheless, it was found that over the whole works the same amount of earth had been moved for the same amount of money.

—Farmers in all parts of Ohio are receiving almost daily notices signed "Working-men's Bread or Blood Committee," and warning them against buying labor-saving machinery, and especially self-binding reapers. Threats are made that every such reaper will be destroyed and stacks of grain burned if an attempt is made to use them.

—The harp may be traced to the remotest antiquity. It was an instrument in high favor in Egypt. At Thebes, a fresco painting was found by an explorer who supposed it to have been executed fourteen hundred years before Christ. In the Illiad, Achilles is represented as playing on a well-wrought harp, with costly frame of polished silver, brought from conquered Thebes.

—According to the census of Peru, taken last year, that country has 18 departments, 3 frontier Provinces, 95 Provincies, 765 districts, 66 large towns, 68 small towns, 1,285 villages, 487 hamlets, 6,200 settlements, and 4,473 haciendas and plantations. The total population is 2,699,945, of which 1,365,945 are men and 1,334,000 women. The 2,699,945 inhabitants of Peru are distributed over a surface of 1,605,742 square kilometres, that is to say, a proportion of two persons, or rather more, to each, the superficies being about equivalent to 250 acres.

—By returns received at the Agricultural Bureau, Washington, from over eleven hundred counties in twenty-nine States, it appears that the crop prospects early in June were by far the best in the history of the country, both as to acreage and average apparent yield per acre. The increased area in winter wheat is 2,500,000 acres: Spring wheat 2,000,000, and oats and rye about nine per cent over last year's planting. Kansas has 500,000 more acres in wheat this year than last, Illinois 300,000; Wisconsin 17, Iowa 25, Minnesota 30, and Nebraska 40 per cent increase in acreage. In all the great grain States the prospect was better than average. Texas this year produces a large quantity of wheat, and in some of the counties the yield is as high as 18, 23 to 31 bushels per acre. The average in all the States will probably be as high as sixteen bushels. This indicates a total harvest, exclusive of the Pacific States, of more than 400,000,000 bushels. Allowing 270,000,000 bushels for home consumption in bread and seed, and but 40,000,000 bushels for the Pacific States, the probable surplus will be 170,000,000 bushels.—S. F. Chronicle.