a) 
1864. | Mauer on Earthquakes. 53 
ing the damaged portion. As an instance of the certainty with which 
the electrical tests now employed can point out the exact locality of a 
fault, we may mention that in one deep-sea line a defect was detected 
by the instruments to exist 190 miles out at sea. A ship repaired to 
the spot, underran the cable, and found the calculation correct within a 
mile. This being mended, the electricians immediately said that their 
tests showed another fault about 112 miles farther. This also was 
found to be the case, with scarcely more error than in the former 
instance. The bed of the Gulf is admirably adapted for the safe pre- 
servation of a cable, being free from those great variations of depth and 
rocky eminences which effected the ruin of the Red Sea cable. In that 
instance the line was laid too tensely, and was suspended consequently 
in festoons between the numerous rocks. It had ample strength to 
bear its own weight in this position, and at first experienced no harm. 
Gradually however, barnacles, seaweeds, &c., found it a convenient 
resting-place ; and in course of time they accumulated on the rope to 
such an extent, as to cause it to break under the additional strain. 
In the new undertaking, the remote possibility of such an occurrence 
as this will be avoided by paying out abundance of slack wherever the 
soundings show much undulation of the sea bottom. 
The success which must attend the Persian Gulf cable, and the 
near approach to certainty of an equally good result in other sub- 
marine lines now in progress, ought to remove much of the financial 
difficulty in inaugurating another attempt to connect England with 
America. The first line proved the possibility of transmitting mes- 
sages across the whole width of the Atlantic. This alone was worth 
all the expenditure incurred; and if the promoters of the new line 
make use only of the information which the death of the old cable 
elicited, the public will have no reason to regret the three quarters of 
a million sterling, now feeding the fishes in the cool depths of the 
Atlantic. 
THE LATE EARTHQUAKE, AND EARTHQUAKES IN 
GENERAL. 
By Rosert Matter, C.E., F.R.S. 
Over a large portion of England, people were startled from sleep, 
shaken by an invisible hand, in the night of the 5-6 October last 
(1863). A few, at once—and most persons after awhile—realized the 
the fact that they had experienced an Earthquake, and escaped un- 
harmed. Amongst the tens of thousands thus aroused, who compared 
notes at breakfast, as to their own reception of the mysterious visitant, 
how few had, or have at this moment, any notion of the narrow margin 
during that sudden and evanescent throb, which divided their own 
fates, between safety and one of the most terrible forms of death— 
that of being buried, bruised, broken, suffocated, or perhaps burnt alive, 
beneath the overthrown ruin of their own hearth and home. Slight 
as was this shock compared with those of other lands, of the terrors 
