2 1 8 THE P OP ULAR S CIENCE MONTHL Y. 



table aspect of the calamity was that it had not come years before. 

 And the providential lesson would seem to be that laws of matter are 

 laws of God, and cannot be violated with impunity. 



"When the earthquake wellnigh swallowed up Peru, five or six 

 years ago, men stood aghast at the mysterious dispensation. But 

 Heaven has not only always declared that tropical countries are liable 

 to earthquakes, but had taught the Peruvians through hundreds of 

 years to expect two earthquakes in a century, travelling in cycles from 

 forty to sixty years apart. The citizens of Africa have not only this 

 general instruction, but that special warning which Nature always 

 gives. A great light appeared to the southeast. Hollow sounds were 

 heard. The dogs, the goats, even the swine, foresaw the evil, and hid 

 themselves. But the simple men passed on and were punished. 



Before the Alpine freshets come, the streams are coffee-colored. 

 Even the tornadoes of the tropics, which are instantaneous in their 

 swoop, so plainly announce themselves to old sailors, that they reef 

 sails and save ship and life, while only the heedless perish. The 

 simoom gives such certain and invariable warnings that the caravan is 

 safe if it be wary. 



Herculaneum and Pompeii were built too far up the mountain. 

 And that the builders knew quite as well as the excavators of the 

 splendid ruins know it now. But they chose to take the risk. And 

 to-day their cheerful compatriots gather their heedless vintage and sit 

 beneath their perilous vines still nearer to the deadly crater. St. 

 Petersburg has been three times inundated, and after each most fatal 

 calamity processions filled the streets and masses were said to propi- 

 tiate the mysterious anger of God. Peter the Great, who built the 

 city, was the successor of Canute. He ordered the Gulf of Kronstadt 

 to retire, and then set down his capital in the swamps of the verge of 

 the Neva. Whenever the river breaks up with the spring-floods, the 

 trembling citizens are at sea in a bowl. Only three times has the 

 bowl broken, so much money and skill have been expended upon it. 

 But when a March gale shall drive the tide back upon the river, swol- 

 len and terrible with drifting ice, drowned St. Petersburg will be the 

 pendant for burned Chicago. 



Modern science has brought the world a fifth gospel. In it we 

 read that God commands us to give him our whole heads as well as 

 our whole hearts, for that we cannot know him nor obey him till we 

 discern him in every minutest fact, and every immutable law of the 

 physical universe, as in every fact and law of the moral. It is barely 

 two hundred years since the great Cotton Mather preached a famous 

 sermon called " Burnings Bewailed," wherein he attributed a terrible 

 conflagration to the wrath of God kindled against Sabbath-breaking 

 and the accursed fashion of monstrous periwigs ! For years after his 

 time the Puritan colonies held fat-ts for mildew, for small-pox, for cater- 

 pillars, for grasshoppers, for loss of cattle by cold and visitation of 



