News and Notes by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Apr 25, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 17.

News and Notes

By Editor

Our next issue's Home department will be for the benefit of the mothers.

The Belgian Senate, by a vote of 50 to 21, has finally agreed to the resolution of the House prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, and sale of absinthe. As it was supported by the government, it will, of course, receive royal assent. The temperance organ, Le Bien Social, an outspoken prohibition organ, has already begun agitating for further legislation to curtail the traffic.

The Dowie Movement is nearing its end as we predicted. "So will end" all work built around men. Priests asked John the Baptist, "Art thou that prophet?" "Art thou Elijah?" And in both instances John answered in the negative. John was content to be only a voice crying in the wilderness. But Alexander Dowie came declaring himself to be Elijah, and, with his conglomerate system of Mormonism, Catholicism, Dowieism, Adventism, and faith-healing, attempting to reform the world by his self-exaltation. Men worshiped him. The idol has fallen. How many will learn the lesson?

The Great Burning Gas Well, near Caney, Kansas, of which Mr. Ketring wrote us so interestingly in last week's issue, has been confined, and the fire extinguished. After repeated effort a great steel hood, weighing over thirty-six tons, was made. This hood had a pipe twelve inches at the top with a valve in it which could be closed. From the side of the hood ran another twelve-inch pipe 300 feet long. When the hood was dropped over the well, the gas and air soon burned out within the hood and carried the flame above it; then the valve was gradually closed, and the gas forced through the other pipe beyond the reach of fire. Soon shovelers covered the bottom of the hood and the mighty giant was chained. It reached a height of 280 feet, and its hourly consumption is estimated at 75,000,000 cubic feet. During the five weeks of its burning the temperature within a radius of a mile of the well was changed to almost summer. Vegetation grew, trees budded and bloomed, birds built their nests, and butterflies came forth as in the Spring. It was a good illustration of the pent-up force of nature in the old earth.