54 Original Articles. | Jan. 
of which we delight to read—as of those of war or shipwreck—it well 
might startle those who felt it, if ignorance were not here bliss to 
nearly all of us. The pulse that careered over the face of England 
on that night, like the breeze that sweeps over, and waves a field of 
standing corn, was probably not greater in the velocity of its wave 
particle than is the velocity which imparts the shock one may feel by 
dropping on his heels from a stone-step six inches in height; but had 
its wave velocity been only as great as that produced by dropping in 
like manner from the height of a chair, it would have laid im ruins 
numbers of our English towns, and would have given us a sharp 
experience, by the loss of life and property, of the mourning and woe 
that are so often the lot of Harthquake countries. 
Indeed, amongst the many natural gifts, referable to Geographical 
position and Geological structure with which Great Britain has been 
so lavishly endowed by Providence, none has been more important 
(though little recognized) in permitting our national development, 
than our immunity from frequent or severe Harthquakes. We may in 
this respect, but in a different sense from him of old, ‘‘ thank God that 
we are not as other men are.’ A single shock, no greater in 
violence than those which occur almost monthly, within less than 
2,000 miles of us (in the Mediterranean Seismic Bands)—one, namely, 
the velocity of whose wave particle should be no more than 12 to 
15 feet per second (not so fast as we sometimes move in a car- 
riage), would not only split and prostrate minster, spire, and column, 
but would leave Manchester, Liverpool, or London, mountainous 
heaps of brickdust, and rubbish, Terrible as are the consequences 
of such utter overthrows in the cities of other lands, our arti- 
ficial conditions would add new horrors to the overturning of our own; 
for besides the conflagration that almost always succeeds the down- 
fall, ignited by the buried household fires or lights, we should have 
superadded, the falling in of great sewers, with the overflow of 
their polluted streams amidst the ruins; the damming, more or 
less, or great tidal rivers like the Thames, by falling bridges; burst 
and spouting water mains; gas escaping and exploding in all sorts 
of cavities amidst these over-ground “ooafs,” viaducts and iron 
bridges brought to the ground by their own inertia, tunnels col- 
lapsed—coal and salt pits and mines ruined—roof and floor in a 
moment brought together—complications of horrors such as can be 
even but inadequately imagined. Happily there is little chance of 
such a catastrophe. Enough has already been ascertained, as to the 
distribution in space over the earth’s surface of Seismic or Harthquake 
energy, to admit of our affirming the extreme improbability of the 
occurrence of any great Harthquake in the British Islands; but there 
is no physical reason why such an event might not occur to-morrow, 
and it is certain also that the Seismic Bands, 7. e. the great ribbon-like 
spaces of maximum Earthquake energy, distributed over the surface 
of our earth, and which may be seen laid down upon the Seismic 
mercator of the world, in the British Association Harthquake Cata- 
logue,* are given to wander, and that we have perilously bad neigh- 
* 28th Report, 1858. 
