REPORTS 
ΟΝ 
THE STATE OF SCIENCE. 
First Report on the Facts of Earthquake Phenomena. 
By Rosert Mautet, (.Ε.. Μ.Κ.1.4. 
THoss striking phenomena of nature which are of comparatively rare and 
uncertain occurrence, have ever been the longest held bound in the darkness 
of superstition, the last to receive the light of truthful investigation. 
In following down the long ‘page of man’s discovery of nature, we shall see 
that it is only in its latest lines that storms and tempests, hail and lightning, 
comets, meteors, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, have been emancipated 
from the superstition (not confined alone to the vulgar) which viewed them 
not as occasional manifestations of the laws of one Creator, always acting 
and always fit and worthy of our highest efforts to discover and elucidate, 
but as the peculiar weapons given into the hands, and subject alone to the 
depraved and capricious wills of the powers of evil, by whose malignant aid 
the witch or the sorcerer should ride the tempest or blast the crop, the 
nations be stirred up to war, the fall of the great ones of the earth be por- 
tended, or monarchs perplexed with fear of change. 
Thus, says Butler, in his ‘Analogy of Religion,’ cap. iv., ‘We know, in- 
deed, several of the general laws of matter, and a great part of the behaviour 
of living agents is reducible to general laws, but we know nothing, in a man- 
ner, by what laws storms and tempests, earthquakes, famine and pestilence 
become the instruments of destruction to mankind. - - - These laws are so 
wholly unknown to us, that we call the events which come to pass by them 
accidental - - though all reasonable men - - conclude that the things which 
vie this appearance are the result of general laws, and may be reduced to 
‘ em.” 
_ Long since the comet has ceased to be a portent, and its recurrent period 
may be predicted. The lightning flash has been identified with and con- 
trolled into the electric carrier of our mandates, and we have begun to com- 
prehend the chain of causation concerned in tempests, tornadoes and hail- 
storms. Last of all, the earthquake is but just emerging from the gloom of 
vulgar superstition and learned neglect into the light of physical truth, and 
is about to take its place as one of the pheenomena of acknowledged cosmical 
laws, whose conditions shall be capable of complete interpretation, although 
_ perhaps from the number of these (as is the case throughout geology) we may 
_be for ever incompetent to predict the occurrence of the phenomenon. 
Such having been the past state of human knowledge as to earthquakes, 
an extensive research into the narratives and histories of these events soon 
convinces one, that in the absence on the part of past authors of any true 
1850. B 
