THE MENTAL EFFECT OF EARTHQUAKES. 259 



earthquake. That, however, is pure conjecture. What is interesting 

 is, that a certain blank consternation seems always to be the charac- 

 teristic herald of an earthquake, as well as the characteristic result. 

 That it should be the characteristic result is, of course, no wonder. 

 The very condition of human life is the solidity of the not very thick 

 earth-crust on which we live, and when that solidity is exchanged for 

 positive fluidity, as it is in the worst earthquakes, it is natural enough 

 that stupefaction should be the result. In one of the Calabrian earth- 

 quakes, it was discovered that large pieces of ground had so changed 

 places that a plantation of mulberry -trees had been carried into the 

 middle of a corn-field and there left, and a field sown with lupines had 

 been carried out into the middle of a vineyard. The Italian lawsuits 

 which resulted from this liquefaction of " real " property may be easily 

 imagined. Still stranger^ in the earthquake in Riobamba in 1797, 

 Alexander von Humboldt found that the whole furniture of one house 

 had been buried beneath the ruins of the next house. " The upper 

 layer of the soil, formed of matter not possessing a great degree of 

 coherency, had moved like water in running streams, and we are com- 

 pelled to suppose that those streams flowed first downward, and at 

 last rose upward. The motion in the shocks which were experienced 

 in Jamaica (July 7, 1692) must have been not less complicated. Ac- 

 cording to the account of an eye-witness, the whole surface of the 

 ground had assumed the appearance of running water. The sea and 

 land appeared to rush on one another, and to mingle in the wildest 

 confusion. Some persons who, at the beginning of the calamity, had 

 escaped into the streets and to the squares of the town, to avoid the 

 danger of being crushed under the ruins of the falling houses, were so 

 violently tossed from one side to the other that many of them received 

 severe contusions, and some were maimed. Others were lifted up, 

 hurled through the air, and thrown down at a distance from the place 

 Avhere they were standing. A few who were in town were carried 

 away to the seashore, which was rather distant, and then thrown into 

 the sea, by which accident, however, their lives were saved." Such 

 a liquefaction of all that is most solid in our world seems a grim 

 enough realization of the prayer of the prophet : " O that thou 

 wouldst rend the heavens, that thou wouldst come down, that the 

 mountains might flow down at thy presence," for the mountains do 

 really flow down in earthquakes, but the effect of that flowing is a 

 consternation such as no other phenomenon of physical life, not even 

 the worst darkness of volcanic eruptions, ever produces. The loss of 

 everything stable at the basis of human life is the collapse of the ordi- 

 nary foundations even of the spiritual life itself, though, if that life 

 has got its roots firmly into the heart, the original foundations may 

 fall away without impairing the vitality of that which at first had 

 propped itself upon them. But, where this is not the case, nothing 

 tends more to that truest Nihilism which, so far from thinking it 



