HERTFORDSHIRE EARTHQUAKES. 149 



" Mr. Mott tells me farther, that at Wickham-hall, which is 

 another farm, about two miles and a haK from him, in the 

 parish of Bishop -Stortford, in the same county, a pond was 

 moved at the same time in the same manner ; and that the first 

 motion of it was from east to west. This account he had from 

 a person, who saw it. He adds, that a like motion was observed 

 in a pond at Thaxted, in the county of Essex ; but of this he 

 knows no particulars. 



" At Eoyston, in the county of Hertford, Mr. Newbell, an 

 ofiicer of the excise, observed an unusual motion in the pond, at 

 ten o'clock in the forenoon, November 1, last past. The pond is 

 a large one, and almost round. The back of it, towards the 

 north, is faced with a brick-wall ; and the bottom of it arises 

 from thence, in a slope, towards the south. The water arose 

 from north to south, so as to go five feet and a half beyond the 

 water-mark. In his [its] return it arose against the brick wall, 

 the top of which was about one foot above the level of the water, 

 so as to run over it. The water aftei*wards moved from north to 

 south, and back again, five times before it stopped." 



Qth October, 1863. 



From the date of the great Lisbon earthquake I cannot find 

 one Hertfordshire record for more than a century, the next 

 reported happening on the 6th of October, 1863. This was 

 investigated by Mr. E. J. Lowe, who gave an account of it in 

 the ' Proceedings of the British (now Eoyal) Meteorological 

 Society.' 



From this we learu that the earthquake was felt throughout 

 the greater part of England and Wales, so far north as Ulverstou 

 and Scarborough, east as Bury St. Edmunds, and south-west as 

 Hayle in Cornwall ; that it also extended to Dublin and 

 Wexford ; that its greatest intensity in the British Isles was in 

 Herefordshire and the adjoining counties ; and that " there were 

 several shocks, the two most severe close together at 3.28 a.m., 

 the less violent ones being felt at 2.25, 3.10, and 4 a.m." About 

 an hour (55 minutes) before its greatest intensity in England, 

 an island was thrown up in the Mediterranean, and a shock was 

 felt in Antigua. 



Mr. Lowe remarks : " The focus of the shock must have been 

 at a great depth, as it was felt almost simultaneously throughout 

 England and Wales, whilst, had it been near the surface, it 

 would have occupied 8 or 10 minutes in travelling to some of the 

 places. The discrepancies in its estimated direction are probably 

 owing to the vertical predominating over the horizontal move- 

 ment. Near the centre of concussion, the explosion occurred 

 immediately after the shock ; but in more distant places the 

 noise was heard to precede the shock, owing to the much more 

 rapid velocity of the sound-wave over that of the earth-wave.'''' 



" At Hei'eford," he says, " an extraordinary sound was heard 

 approaching from the west, accompanied by a violent shaking 



