Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1884 — About Earthquakes. [ARTICLE]

About Earthquakes.

England has been visited by earthquakes several times, of which the following have been recorded: One felt throughout England in 1089; another felt throhght the country in 1274, by which Glastonbury was destroyed; the greatest known in that country up to that time, on November 14, 1318; a slight shock in London on February 8, 1749. and a severe one on March 8; and the latest recorded, a very slight one (in the northwestern part of England on November 9, 1852. England, as will be seen from the above instances, has had little practical experience of earthqjuakes, and they loom, tberefdfe,Tafge with all the terrors of the unknown, added to those of the truly terrible. The mere word of a madman that an earthquake was to be expected on a certain day was sufficient to send thousands of persons of wealth and fashion to spend the njght of April 6, 1750, in Hyde Park, in tents and carriages. April 7 passed, however, and the trembling bivouackers returned home, disappointed of their country where such disturbances are frequent few people would think it w orth v hilc to be robbed of a night’s rest for such a trifle. Fondness for earthquakes is an acquired taste. Natives of land where thi- ground is seldom still conie to be quite proud of their volcanies and mud-squirts, as in New Zealand, andjike to point out their phenomena.to visitors, who, for their part, are perpetually cn the qui vive lest the ground should suddenly get up behind their backs and swallow them. The natives at Catania were once excessively indignant. .because Sir John Herschel reduced the height at .Etna, the pride and boast of the locality which it had twice destroyed, by some three thousand feet, with his scientific measurements. Anaxagoras, starting from a purely. scientific basis, argued. TOO years before Christ, that earthquakes and volcanoes were simply the results of underground lightning, and after an earthquake had been felt in London in 1749 men of -science again began to conceive the “new opinion” that earthquakes were duo to subterranean electricity. Anax—agoras, if they- had lived a thousand years earlier, would have told them as much. But between these two dates the errors that prevaled upon the sub ject were frightful enough to produce the effect attributed to the earthquake at Meacum, which “caused the hair to stare for fear in all the beholders.’' The “learned Ai abricks” G eber, Avicenna and Almanzor—-were accused by Sir Thomas Browne of believing t!ie doctrine of the Koran that earthquakes arise from the motion of,the great bull uponwhose horns the eaTth is-ppised. Unfortunately, however, it.happens that the Koran teaches nothing of the sort. Bnt one ridiculous item of doctrine mere or less in that volrfme makes little difference among so many, as queer opinions about earthquakes were common enough without dragging the “learned Arabicks” into the muddle. Sir Thomas Browne hin self appears to have suspected much of the true nature of earthquakes, as it is understood nt present, and left in his “Popular Errors” precise directions for their manufacture, so that in the next century Lemery, a famous French experimentalist, enjqyed the pleasure of seeing an" earthquake—composed of sulphur, water and iron filings, wrapped in a rag and buried underground—-in full activity in his own back garden. The science of earthquakes has not yet gone so far as to determine the exact nature of the connection between apparently isolated shocks occurring within a brief interval of time. Obviously the rate of progress which these subterranean disturbances make must be exceedingly great, and the energy they possess must increase aS they proceed, if we accept the supposition that the disaster in Java, for example, has any relation with the one which has desolated one of the fairest isles of Italy. If one takes a inap of the world and draws a line, commencing on the western shore of Great Britain, and proceed thence by almost any route that may please the fancy through Ischia and Java and then on to Japan, it will be seen how very arbitrary a course the earthquake energy must take, assuming a connection between the various shocks. Moreover, any theory that may be based upon this supposition Encounters a difficulty from the degrees in which the energy declares itself at different places.— N. Y. Herald.