820 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



on, and finished the work of the first. With it five thousand persons 

 were buried under the rubbish. A little while afterward four thou- 

 sand other persons were killed. Hardly had the people recovered 

 from the terror of one shock, than others came on, causing general 

 panic and stupor. Hardly a quarter of an hour would pass without a 

 new shock, and the wounded who had succeeded in extricating them- 

 selves from the rubbish were buried in it again. " Death," said an 

 eye-witness, " seemed to pursue its victims with fury. In less than an 

 hour Scio was an utter ruin." The agitations of the ground con- 

 tinued, with only short interruptions, for a year. During 1879 and 

 1880 Scio had suffered from frequent tremors, sometimes repeated as 

 many as ten times in a day. Mitylene and Smyrna were also similarly 

 affected, but none of the shocks were strong enough to cause great 

 anxiety. They were, as it were, the subterranean preparation for the 

 catastrophe that was to burst out a few months afterward. 



The disaster that desolated the Island of Ischia two years afterward 

 excited no less of emotion. The main shock, on the 28th of July, 

 1883, was accompanied by a fearful rumbling, which was estimated 

 to last about twenty seconds. There was an extremely violent up- 

 ward movement that broke up the houses, followed by an undulatory 

 pulsation. The points most disturbed were aligned along the two 

 deep fractures of strata that traverse the island at right angles to one 

 another, crossing nearly under Casamicciola. 



Less than a month after the shocks at Ischia followed the terrific 

 explosion of the volcanic Island of Krakatoa, near Java, with all its 

 unparalleled accompaniments : the planting of a deep sea where had 

 been a mountain ; the prodigious masses of pumice and stones from 

 the volcanic throat causing intense darkness for hours at long dis- 

 tances ; the finer particles scattering in the atmosphere and disturbing 

 its transparency and causing the red lights for months ; the marine 

 waves propagated to the ends of the ocean with the speed of the tides ; 

 the aerial waves making the circuit of the globe, according to baro- 

 metrical registrations, in two opposite directions ; the thirty thousand 

 human beings that perished ; and the villages and cultivated lands 

 which it blotted out all caused a most vivid impression in all civil- 

 ized lands. 



Now it is Andalusia, one of the finest parts of Europe, that is 

 struck with disasters. The shock that was felt on the 22d of De- 

 cember, 1884, on the western coasts of Spain and Portugal, and as far 

 as the Azores and Madeira, seemed to be a forerunner of the one, of 

 incomparably greater intensity, that took place three days afterward 

 in another part of the Iberian Peninsula. At about nine o'clock in 

 the evening of the 25th of December, the southern part of Andalusia 

 was so roughly shaken that fifty-six towns and villages in the prov- 

 inces of Malaga and Granada were devastated in less than ten seconds ; 

 and twenty of these places were nearly entirely destroyed. Among 



