136 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Italians to contribute to the support of their compatriots in Calabria 

 and Sicily. As a result of this burden, a strong party in the govern- 

 ment has long been advocating a separation of the two sections, which 

 would leave Calabria and Sicily to care for themselves. 



To these discouraging general conditions must be added a series 

 of special calamities which have befallen southern Italy since the sum- 

 mer of 1905. In September of that year, without warning of any 

 kind, came the blow of the great Calabrian earthquake, the shocks of 

 which destroyed property to the value of nearly $10,000,000, besides 

 leaving a long list of killed and wounded. Both government aid and 

 large private subscriptions from the northern provinces were necessary 

 in order to succor the victims and in part to rebuild the mined villages. 



In the following spring heavy rains largely ruined the crops in 

 Sicily, and in April occurred the great eruption of Vesuvius which 

 spread a mantle of ash on the flanks of the mountain, so as to bury 

 the vineyards and remove for some years the sources of livelihood. 

 Many thousand people who dwell upon the flanks of the volcano were 

 thus thrown upon the government for support and the more favored 

 Italians in the northern provinces were obliged to make further sac- 

 rifices for their relief. 



What, we ask, is Italy to do in the face of the new disaster, follow- 

 ing as it does so swiftly upon the heels of the others, and dwarfing 

 them by its proportions. It avails nothing now to argue that much 

 of the loss of life and property might easily have been avoided, had 

 buildings suited to such a seismic district been constructed. This 

 fact has again and again been pointed out by properly qualified persons 

 after each fresh disaster, but the force of inherited tradition is not so 

 easily turned aside, and it was only after the earthquake of 1905 that 

 the beginning of better things was seen. Then in place of the loose 

 stone and tile houses — veritable man deadfalls — which have again and 

 again been raised over their own ruins, strong wooden barracks were 

 constructed under government supervision. It is, however, only in 

 such towns as were largely destroyed in 1905 that such reform measures 

 have been adopted. 



Leaving now the humanitarian side of this calamity we may turn 

 to its scientific aspects. Enough is already known to state that the site 

 of the heaviest movement lay in and about that small arm of the Med- 

 iterranean which separates Sicily from the mainland of Italy — a sec- 

 tion of crust, therefore, which immediately adjoins upon the west 

 that which was heavily shaken in the fall of 1905. This fact, no doubt, 

 helps to explain the otherwise exceptional character, since a destructive 

 earthquake is apt to be followed liy a rather long period of comparative 

 quiet, so soon as the so-called aftershocks have faded away. The great 



