A MIGHTY SEA- WA YE. 



171 



and want of individuality pervades modern books. 

 You would think they were all written by the 

 same man. The ideas they contain do not seem 

 to have passed through the mind of the writer. 

 They have not even that originality — the ODly 

 originality which John Mill in his modesty would 

 claim for himself — " which every thoughtful mind 

 gives to its own mode of conceiving and express- 

 ing truths which are common property " — (" Au- 

 tobiography," p. 110). When you are in London 

 step into the reading-room of the British Museum. 

 There is the great manufactory out of which we 

 turn the books of the season. We are all there 

 at work for Smith and Mudie. It was so before 

 there was any British Museum. It was so in 

 Chaucer's time : 



" For out of the olde fleldes, as men saythe, 

 Cometh all this newe corn fro yere to yere, 

 And out of olde bookes in good faithe 

 Cometh all this newe science that men lere." 



It continued to be so in Cervantes's day. " There 

 are," says Cervantes in " Don Quixote " (32), " men 

 who will make you books and turn them loose in 



the world with as much dispatch as they would 

 do a dish of fritters." 



It is not, then, any wonder that De Quincey 

 should account it (" Life of De Quincey," i., 385) 

 " one of the misfortunes of life that one must read 

 thousands of books only to discover that one 

 need not have read them," or that Mrs. Brown- 

 ing should say : " The ne phis ultra of intellectual 

 indolence is this reading of books. It comes next 

 to what the Americans call whittling." And I 

 cannot doubt that Bishop Butler had observed 

 the same phenomenon which has been my subject 

 to-night when he wrote, in 1729, a century and a 

 half ago (" Preface to Sermons," p. 4) : " The 

 great number of books of amusement which daily 

 come in one's way, have in part occasioned this 

 idle way of considering things. By this means 

 time, even in solitude, is happily got rid of with- 

 out the pain of attention ; neither is any part of 

 it more put to the account of idleness, one can 

 scarce forbear saying is spent with less thought, 

 than great part of that which is spent in read- 

 ing." — Fortnightly Review. 



A MIGHTY SEA-WAYE. 



ON May 10th last a tremendous wave swept 

 the Pacific Ocean from Peru northward, 

 westward, and southward, traveling at a rate 

 many times greater than that of the swiftest 

 express - train. For reasons best known to 

 themselves, writers in the newspapers have by 

 almost common consent called this phenomenon 

 a tidal wave. But the tides have had nothing to 

 do with it. Unquestionably the wave resulted 

 from the upheaval of the bed of the ocean in 

 some part of that angle of the Pacific Ocean 

 which is bounded by the shores of Peru and Chili. 

 This region has long been celebrated for tremen- 

 dous submarine and subterranean upheavals. 

 The opinions of geologists and geographers have 

 been divided as to the real origin of the dis- 

 turbances by which at one time the land, at an- 

 other time the sea, and at yet other times (often- 

 er in fact than either of the others) both land and 

 sea, have been shaken as by some migbty im- 

 prisoned giant, struggling, like Prometheus, to 

 cast from his limbs the mountain-masses which 

 hold them down. Some consider that the seat of 

 the Tulcanian forces lies deep below that part of 

 the chain of the Andes which lies at the apex of 



the angle just mentioned, and that the direction 

 of their action varies according to the varying 

 conditions under which the imprisoned gases find 

 vent. Others consider that there are two if not 

 several seats of subterranean activity. Yet oth- 

 ers suppose that the real seat of disturbance lies 

 beneath the ocean itself, a view which seems to 

 find support in several phenomena of recent Pe- 

 ruvian earthquakes. 



Although we have not as yet full information 

 concerning the great wave which in May last 

 swept across the Pacific, and northward and 

 southward along the shores of the two Americas, 

 it may be interesting to consider some of the 

 more striking features of this great disturbance 

 of the so-called peaceful ocean, and to compare 

 them with those which have characterized former 

 disturbances of a similar kind. We may thus, 

 perhaps, find some evidence by which an opinion 

 may be formed as to the real seat of subterra- 

 nean activity in this region. 



It may seem strange, in dealing with the case 

 of a wave which apparently had its origin in or 

 near Peru on May 9th, to consider the behavior 

 of a volcano, distant 5,000 miles from this region, 



