AMERICA AND SEISMOLOGICAL RESEARCH 227 



point reached, an entirely new field has been opened before our eyes. 

 The new autographs of earthquakes have characters dependent upon the 

 distances the waves have traveled to produce the record; so that the 

 observer at a station can unaided give the distance of the disturbance 

 within 50 miles, an error negligible in view of the extended area dis- 

 turbed. 



By combining records made at several widely-separated stations, 

 not only the distance from a given station, but a sufficiently exact 

 location for each quake, is easily obtained. To have developed a great 

 system of some forty such stations, scattered throughout the length 

 and breadth of the globe, is the great service rendered to science by the 

 British Association for the Advancement of Science, especially, and 

 by the leader of its Seismological Committee, Professor John Milne. 

 Thus it has been revealed that the great earthquakes of the planet are 

 twentyfold more numerous than those reported by observation in situ, 

 and that most of them occur upon the floor of the ocean, where other 

 methods of observation would have failed to reveal their presence. 



The analysis of the complex of waves registered in the seismogram 

 is extending our knowledge of the nature of the earth's interior, and 

 affording the solution of problems which, in importance and in difficulty 

 of approach from other directions, can only be compared with those 

 now being solved by the study of radioactivity. 



No attempt to sum up the achievements of seismological research 

 during the past ten years should fail to note the fact that the Japanese 

 have for systematic and thorough study of the general problems, but 

 even more for the practical applications of these investigations to the 

 amelioration of the conditions in an earthquake-tormented country, 

 taken the first place among the nations. Italy, also, with almost a 

 score of stations of the first rank and with two hundred correspondents 

 scattered throughout its small territory (to telegraph the first news of 

 a quaking to the main office at Borne), has played no mean part in the 

 advance of the science. 



The center of earthquake investigation upon the continent is now, 

 however, the Imperial German Chief Station for Earthquake Investi- 

 gation at Strasburg. Professor Gerland, its director, now issues the 

 annual catalogue of earthquakes, and he has the credit of having organ- 

 ized, in 1903, the International Seismological Association, and of hav- 

 ing founded its journal, the Beitrdge zur Geophysik. The work of the 

 station now devolves largely upon his highly-trained assistants, Pro- 

 fessor Budolph and Dr. Sieberg. 



The writer assumes that a beneficent result may be expected to 

 follow from the frightful calamity at San Francisco in the stimula- 

 tion of seismological research in America; so that we may later take 

 our proper share of both the labor and its rewards. The start can 



