THE MENTAL EFFECT OF EARTHQUAKES. 257 



acid and lime, not mucli more than good spring-water, and perhaps 

 an almost infinitesimal trace of copper, so slight as only to be de- 

 tected in a large quantity of the substance. I do not doubt but 

 that glucoses have been sold which contain large quantities of free 

 sulphuric acid and likewise other injurious ingredients. But these are 

 due to carelessness in manufacture, and are not constituents of the 

 genuine article. I have never found a glucose of this kind. Many of 

 the impurities which have been imputed to glucose, really belong to 

 the cane-sirups with which they have been mixed. These largely 

 adulterated glucoses should always be looked upon with suspicion. 

 The cane-sirups, which are used for this purpose, yield from three to 

 five per cent, of ash, while the ash from a genuine glucose is so little 

 as to be almost unweighable. 



There is no reason to believe that a glucose or grape-sugar prop- 

 erly manufactured is any less wholesome than cane- or maple-sugar. 

 Corn, the new American king, now supplies us with bread, meat, and 

 sugar, which we need, as well as with the whisky which we could do 

 without. 







THE MEXTAL EFFECT OF EAETHQUAKES. 



THE outbreak of new earthquakes, first at Agram, then in Ischia, 

 and now in Chios, the last the most destructive of all, and cost- 

 ing thousands of lives, within a few weeks of each other, seems to 

 show that a period of earthquake-shock may have begun which may 

 affect, to an extent by no means inconsiderable, the history and life of 

 our century. No one can doubt that the earthquakes and volcanic 

 eruptions which visited the same general region, but more especially 

 Asia Minor and Italy, during the first and second centuries of our era, 

 produced great effects, not only on the minds and characters of that 

 generation, but even on the distribution of population ; nor that the 

 earthquake at Lisbon, in the last century, produced almost as great a 

 shock on the thoughts of men as it produced physically on the im- 

 mense region over which its effects were felt a region which included 

 almost all Europe, part of Africa, and part of the American Continent. 

 A spell of earthquake of any violence or duration, which should ex- 

 tend over such a field as that, would, in a time like our own, when 

 every influence is intensified by the simultaneous transmission of the 

 impressions it produces to all parts of the globe, produce the most 

 powerful effects, not simply on the countries which might suffer from 

 it, but on all the world. No physical phenomena, however dreadful, 

 seem to produce the same sense of paralysis as earthquakes. A corre- 

 spondent of Captain Basil Hall, who was in the earthquake of Copiapo, 



VOL. XIX. 1*7 



