392 SEE— THE CAUSE OF EARTHQUAKES. [October 19, 



If we examine the violent Japanese earthquakes we shall find 

 that most of them, as Professor Milne says, arise under the sea near 

 the seashore or at the heads of bays, where the influence of the sea 

 would predominate. It seems impossible to doubt that they are due 

 to the influence of steam formed in the earth beneath ; for the island 

 of Nipon is essentially narrow, mountainous and broken by great 

 irregularity of topography, so that the seepage of water is easily 

 accounted for, and more especially since the worst earthquakes are 

 on the east coast and partly under the sea on the edge of the Tus- 

 carora Deep, where the shore is steepest and the sea pressure 

 greatest. Moreover, it is shown in § 33 that the whole island of 

 Nipon has been uplifted by injections of matter expelled largely 

 from under the bed of the Tuscarora Deep ; and what is more nat- 

 ural than to suppose that this process is still going on ? This infer- 

 ence in fact is confirmed by the secular elevation of the east coast 

 observed within the historical period. 



The regions of Iberian Peninsula visited by violent earthquakes 

 are those similarly exposed to the sea — Lisbon and the southern prov- 

 inces, such as Andalusia, which are also broken and mountainous, and 

 have been recently rising from the sea. In Italy the region of great- 

 est and most violent disturbance is Calabria, the *' toe of the boot," 

 which is a long peninsula nearly surrounded by the sea and of re- 

 markably fractured and broken topography. The islands of Sicily, 

 Ischia, Lapari, Stromboli and the coast near Vesuvius is similar, 

 and all these regions are still rising from the sea. Nearly all Greece 

 is very broken and mountainous and it has always suffered severely 

 from earthquakes. In Hungary, where the severe earthquake of 

 Agram, Croatia, occurred November 9, 1880, the country is full of 

 hot springs, indicating an abundance of underground water, and 

 while the volcanoes have died out the earthquakes still survive. The 

 earthquake in Silesia, June 11, 1895, occurred in a region of the 

 same kind. 



If now we turn to Central America we find it a narrow broken 

 country with sea on both sides ; and on the other side of the Pacific, 

 New Zealand is a narrow island like Japan, and the presence of 

 violent earthquakes there is not strange. The same may be said 

 of the Aleutian Islands and the whole East Indian Archipelago, 

 including the Philippines. 



