SECULAR NEWS by Editor

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 29, 1878

SECULAR NEWS.

By Editor

—The first steamer appeared on the Thames in 1801.

—San Francisco has a population of 320,000.

—In the United States there are 530 females practicing as doctors, 420 as dentists, 5 as lawyers, and 68 as preachers.

—The college of physicians and surgeons in Philadelphia, after careful examination, certify that in the city of Philadelphia alone, at least seven hundred deaths were traced to intemperance in a single year.

—Twenty-eight railways in the United States were under foreclosure during the past six months. Their total length is 2,184 miles and their indebtedness $114,674,000. All but one were Western roads.

—The government has bought three hundred thousand ounces of fine silver from the Bank of California, three hundred thousand from the Anglo-California Bank, and seventy thousand from Lazard Freres, all payable in standard dollars.

—Four wagons were required to carry away the money taken at the gates of the Paris Exposition on the 30th of June. Ordinarily no money is taken at the gates, as tickets must be purchased elsewhere, but the day of the fete the price of admission was only five cents and no tickets were required. As there is no piece in the French coinage between two cents and ten cents, all the money, about 130,000 francs, was bronze one and two cent pieces.

—There were three earthquake shocks felt at Cave Creek, southern Utah, on the 16th, breaking windows and dishes.

—The little republic of Switzerland has an army of 20,000, organized in eight divisions. There are 94,000 infantry, 16,500 artillery, 3,500 engineers, 2,700 sanitary force, and 2,000 cavalry. Besides this, which is called the elite army, there is a Landwehr of 92,000 men.

—August 21, the works of the Miners' Powder Company at Negaunee, Mich., exploded, doing terrible execution upon buildings, fences, glass and trees, and killing five men. The men were engaged in making nitro-glycerine and other powerful powder. The cause of the explosion is unknown.

—A destructive flood is reported from Eureka, Nevada, on the 15th. No lives were lost. The streets were gullied throughout, and strewn with cordwood and rubbish. All the lower stories were flooded. It was not a cloudburst, in the technical acceptation of that term, but merely a violent rainstorm extending over the forty mile area of watershed lying south of the town, the only outlet for which is the narrow canyon in which the town of Eureka is built. It had been raining for about two hours before the whistles from the furnaces and men on horseback gave warning of the approach of the flood. It is believed no occupied houses were washed away, buildings erected since the flood of four years ago having been built on a higher plain. Loss estimated at from $50,000 to $60,000.