1864. | Mauer on Earthquakes. 55 
bours not so far away to the north and south of us, so that a time may 
arrive, when some remote posterity of our own may become partakers 
in, if not successors to, their misfortunes. But although our country 
is thus happily placed in one of the quieter havens of this heaving 
world (upon the surface of which not a day passes without an Earth- 
quake somewhere, nor any eight consecutive months without one great 
enough to prostrate buildings over thousands of square miles), and is 
so circumstanced as never to be very violently shaken, yet we are shaken 
much more frequently than people generallyimagine ; and now and then, 
as on the late occasion, the shock is sufficiently severe to be of a very 
awakening character. 
Since the 11th century, there are upon record as occurring in the 
British Islands, including the Hebrides, nearly 240 Earthquakes. 
Statistics have been tabulated which indicate the probability that 
up to the end of the 17th century not more than one-twelfth of the 
Earthquakes that occurred in Great Britain were recorded at all, nor 
more than one-half, up to the end of the 18th century. And at the 
present moment, there is good ground to conclude that about two 
Earthquakes per week shake the soil of England, Scotland, or Ireland, 
without counting minute and continually repeated vibratory jars, such 
as those long remarked at Comrie in Scotland. Now and then, some 
of these British shocks are not quite to be despised ; for example, on 
the 13th of August, 1816, an Earthquake, that extended with violence 
over more than 100 square miles of Scotland, shook down part, and 
twisted upon its base the whole of the spire of the church of Aberdeen. 
On March 17th, 1843, an Earthquake, great enough to damage build- 
ings, occurred in the North of England, and reached from Northumber- 
land down to Flintshire, and from the Isle of Man to beyond Cheshire ; 
and no longer ago than on the 9th November, 1852, a shock which 
threw down strong walls at Shrewsbury, extended over the British 
Islands from Dumbarton nearly to Dartmoor, in Devon—and from 
Enniskillen, in Ireland, to Gainsboro’ in Lincolnshire. 
Nothing was so remarkable in the mass of letters from Correspon- 
dents as to the late Harthquake (of October) with which ‘The Times’ 
and other Papers were for a few days afterwards filled, as the dense 
ignorance that prevails amongst all classes as to the nature of these 
phenomena, and of the circumstances that it is desirable to observe with 
respect to them. 
One writer’s letter contains literally but two facts, that “he felt 
something ” which he thought must have been an Earthquake—and that 
“he got up, and immediately lighted a candle,”’—he might have added, 
that in this case he did not put it under a bushel! The pseudo-scientific 
“communications” chiefly record the exact state of Barometer and 
Thermometer at the moment of shock ; facts now known to be nearly 
as irrelevant as the price of Consols the day before. Nor is this ignor- 
ance confined to the more “ignoble vulgar,” for a professed Meteoro- 
logist, for the benefit of ‘the public at large, prints in ‘The Times’ a 
string of inquiries to which he demands answers, but which point to 
nothing so clearly as the writer’s ignorance of the subject that he 
meddled with, and which he seems to think is still, as in the venerable 
