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ΟΝ THE FACTS OF EARTHQUAKE PHAZNOMENA. 63 
by John Shower, 1750, 8vo). In the year 602 a second earthquake of the 
country about Antioch slew 60,000 persons. (Cluverius.) 
In the earthquake in the province of Quito of 1797, notwithstanding the 
thinness of the population, 40,000 natives are stated by Humboldt to have 
been buried in crevasses or under the ruins of buildings, or drowned in lakes 
or ponds temporarily formed. (Per. Nar. vol. ii. p. 237.) 
Such are the numbers to be met with in narratives ; and if we suppose but 
one great earthquake in three years over the whole earth, and that this in- 
volves the entombment of only 10,000 human beings, and that such has been 
the economy of our system for the last 4000 years, we shall have a number 
representing above 13,000,000 of men thus suddenly swallowed up, with 
countless bodies of animals of every lower class. Sir Charles Lyell then 
with good reason suggests that even in our own time we may yet find the 
remains of men and of their habitations and implements thus buried deep and 
embalmed as it were, by earthquakes that occurred in the days of Moses and 
the Ptolemies. 
But such entombments extend also largely to the vegetable world; masses 
of vegetable matter, entangled beds of broken branches and leaves and single 
trees, with all their peculiar insect and other inhabitants, have with man thus 
found a common grave. And at the present moment, short as has been the 
lapse of time, were excavations carefully made in the deep clay and sand of 
the Calabrian plain, there can be no doubt but that evidence would be dis- 
covered throwing much light upon the nature of those obscure processes by 
which vegetable and animal forms are mineralized and preserved, and that 
we should already find many of the trunks of trees buried in the sand, 
converted into brown coal or lignite, and thus presenting us with an ex- 
planation of that puzzling fact we so often see in the sandstones of our own 
coal-measures, as for instance at Gascube Quarry near Glasgow, where in the 
midst of perfectly clear undiscoloured beds of sandstone of enormous thick- 
ness, we now and then find a trunk of a single tree buried and fossilized, but 
bearing no traceable relation, either to the direction of the beds in which it 
is found, or to any conceivable process of their deposition. How readily may 
such facts be brought to bear upon the heterogeneous gathering together of 
multitudes of forms, such as those of the-fish of Monte Bolca, at one spot! 
and again, reflectively, the occurrence of such remains thus thrown together, 
may become the indices to us, of the loci of ancient earthquakes, as erratic 
blocks are assumed to be of ancient ice. Nor must the effects of great sea- 
waves, in entombing beneath the sea in littoral deposits, the various natural 
and artificial productions of the land, be overlooked. ‘The great sea wave,” 
says Caldcleugh, “in its reflux brings everything to sea along with it.” (Phil. 
Trans. 1836, p. 21.) 
Large however as thus would seem to be the gross effects of earthquake 
action upon the organic world, they are probably insignificant in comparison 
with the aggregate entombment even of man alone, due to the every-day 
progress of accidental events ; and shipwrecks alone will probably disclose a 
vaster mortality, ‘when the sea shall give up her dead,” than all that have 
perished by earthquake and its effects. 
It only remains now for me to make a few observations upon the assumed and 
presumable CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ASTRONOMICAL AND METEOROLOGICAL 
PHENOMENA AND EARTHQUAKES; and first as to the former. Numerical 
discussions of earthquake catalogues have been made by several persons, as 
the Abbé Scina of Palermo, Von Hoff, Merian, Hoffman, Cotte and Perrey, 
for the purpose of discovering their frequency at any one particular period 
of the year, or during the lapse of some centuries ; but always upon insuf- 
