Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 June 1887 — THEORIES OF EARTHQUAKES. [ARTICLE]

THEORIES OF EARTHQUAKES.

The Od<F Reasons Given in Former Times for Convulsions of Nature. Prof. Milne passed on to the myths which attribute earthquakes to a creat- i ure living underground, says Nature, j describing a lecture delivered in J apan. In Japan it is an “earthquake insect’’ covered with scales, and having eight legs, or a great fish having a certain rock on his head which helped to keep him quiet. In Mongolia the animal is said to be a frog, in India the wor'dbearing elephant, in the Celebes a world-supporting hog, in North America a tortoise. In Liberia there was a myth, connected with the great bones found there, that these were the remains of animals that lived underground, the trampling of which made the ground shake. In Kamtchatka the legend was connected with a g6d, Tuil, who went out hunting with his dogs. "When these latter stopped to scratch themselves their movements produced earthquakes. In Scandinavian mythology, Loki, having killed his brother Baldwin, was bound to a rock face upward, so that the poison of a serpent should drop on his face’. Loki’s wife, 'however, intercepted the poison in a vessel, and it was only when she had to igo away to empty the dish that a few drops reached him and caused him to writhe and shake the earth. The lecturer had no means of collecting the fables of the southern hemisphere ; but they would obviously be worth knowing for purposes of comparison. As to quasi-scientific theories, these endeavored to account for earthquakes as part of the ordinary operations of nature. It was supposed, for instance, that they were produced by the action of wind confined inside the earth. The Chinese philosophers said that Yang, the male element, entered the earth and caused it to expand, and to shake the ground in its efforts to •escape. Its effects would be more violent beneath the mountains than in the plains, and, therefore, earthquakes in the north of China, which was mountainous, were said to be more violent than those in the south. It was supposed that when the wind was blowing strongly on the surface of the earth there was calm beneath, and vice versa. Aristotle and many other classical writers attributed earthquakes to wind in the earth. Shakspeare in “Henry IV. ” speaks of the teeming earth being pinched and vexed with a kind of colic by the imprisoned and unruly wind within her womb. Then come the theories of electrical discharges, which were advocated in 1760 by l)r. Stukely, as well as by Percival and Priestley. They are strongly held in California at the present day, where it was believed that the network of rails protected the State against any dangerous accumulation of electricity. But Prof. Milne showed that the laying down of rails in Japan had no such effect He thought the electric phenomena which sometimes attended earthquakes were their consequences, not their causes. He had himself experimented with dynamite placed in a hole; an earth-plate was fixed about thirty yards away from the dynamite, and from it a wire was carried some distance to another earth-plate. When the dynamite charge was exploded there was certainly a current produced, as was indicated by a strong deflection of a galvanometer needle at the end of the wire. He attributed this to chemical action. When the ground was shaken there was always a greater or less action by increase or decrease of pressure in connection with the earthplate.