There is said to be a great and very profitable salt mine in the lands occu. pied by the Choctaw nation, and within a few miles are several hundred acres of land underlaid with coal of a fine quality, enough to supply the whole country for a hundred years. India has had a curious railway accident. An elephant, seeing the red li ht and the smoke, concluded that the noisy locomotive was an enemy to b e summarily demolished. He accordingly placed himself on the track, and met the strange creature head on, with trunk and tusks. The result was a dead elephant, and eleven cars capsized. The communication between France and England by telegraph, were recently said to be entirely cut off. It is now ofl cially stated that of the five cables which connect France and Belgium with England, two had been ruptured by the tempest, and that the land communications which join the three others on each side of the channel had also been broken. The Chicago Journal of Commerce says, a man in Des Moines, Iowa*, has erected a dwelling house for himself, built mostly of paper. The weather boarding, inside walls, and shingling, are of that material known in the West as the "Kock Kiver Company's Building Paper." The cost is about two-thirds that of the ordinary materials, and the house, it is said, is much warmer than where plaster and wood are used. The Chicago Journal of Commerce estimates that 1,656,708,538 feet of lumber, exclusive of laths, pickets, and shingles, were manufactured in Michigan in 1868. Saginaw leads off with 457,396,222 feet; Muskegon comes next with 245,000,000, andManistee third with 155,000,000, The Southern Pacific Bailroad, says the San Francisco Bulletin, cuts one* of the richest mineral belts in the world, in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The road will thread its way among gold, silver, and copper mines. Unionville, in Hartford County, has water power estimated to be equal to 4,000 horses. This drives the machinery of two grist and saw mills, one wood-turning shop on a large scale, three large paper mills, one musical in strument shop, one each of nuts and bolts, saws, straps, carpenters' tools hooks and eyes, f oundery and plow and machine shops. A Hartfora company have recently made several steam gongs six feet, high and sixteen inches in diameter. We hope they will not " all speak a once" while we are around. A firm in Springfield, Mass., turns out 400,000 gross of patent steel watch keys, besides jewelers keys, combined knife and tweezers, and other notions. Three Dubuque miners have struck a lead lode, the sheet of mineral in the cap of which is two feet thick, and mineral shows in all directions in the black mud. The Herald says the prospectrivalsthe richest of the day. The value of the boots and shoes made annually in Massachusetts, is said to foot up the enormous sum of one hundred millions of dollars. Kansas boasts that its salt springs are inexhaustible and produce the purest salt of any in the United States. Great activity in copper mining stocks is reported since the passage oi the copper tariff. Thirty miles above Cairo, in the Mississippi, there has been discovered; fine coal seam, four feet thick, width undetermined. About seventeen thousand bushels of coal are daily mined in Rock Island county, Illinois. Chicago has nearly sixty miles of Mcolson pavement. Chicago shipped last year forty million bushels of wheat. A company in Springfield, Mass., make 125,000 paper collars daily.