58 Original Articles. [Jan. © 
down, replace the objects they have displaced, and are of the nature 
of tremors, are raAwarias. 
The first, the second, and the two last, are clear, and almost exactly 
expressive of the sensible differences of Harthquake shocks: but in 
the two between, Aristotle either classes Volcanic Eruptions with 
Earthquakes as all parts of one common train of events—or con- 
founds the shock with its consequences, 7. e. the Earthquake with 
its secondary effects. Beyond the proof which this classification 
affords, that nearly two thousand five hundred years ago, Earthquakes 
were much the same as they are now, no man can learn anything 
from the disquisitions of Aristotle. 
Partly from the Greek being in these passages in many places 
corrupt, but far more from the fact that the Greeks had no distinct 
notions as to those forces of matter we call “molecular,” nor yet 
any clear metaphysics, an abuse of words is found in their Physical 
writings which often renders them almost unintelligible: tyevua is in 
some sort the cause of all earthquakes, says Aristotle; but whether 
by the word, he meant simply the winds, or some intangible imponder- 
able force or agent present in the earth and above it, acting upon 
the winds, and acted on by them, though not the winds themselves, 
and giving rise to Harthquakes and Volcanoes, it is impossible to 
determine. The word ryvcjua was used to express pure spirit, and 
the wind, as well as condensable vapours, indifferently and alike, by 
the vulgar, and by the philosopher. Thus in John’s Gospel, cap. iil. 
v. 8, this word occurs twice in the same verse, and is translated wind 
first, and spirit afterwards in our version. 
The views of the great and philosophic Seneca are far more 
distinct and important. What Humboldt wrote, was true at the time, 
and the ‘ Questiones Naturales’ contain the germ of almost everything 
that has been advanced in modern times as to Volcanic action in its 
larger sense. 
But we must hurry away from classic days, leaving Pliny without 
notice, and pass on and over the centuries of the so-called dark ages, 
and of the revival of knowledge, remarking only that in the fifteenth, 
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, innumerable pamphlets and 
books were published, most of them recording with a grand gobe- 
mouche credulity, all sorts of signs and wonders, and straightway 
founding a theory thereon. In the seventeenth century, these usually 
“improved the occasion” by pointing out that the particular Harth- 
quake was a special judgment on some unfriendly nation or obnoxious 
creed. The crudest and wildest hypotheses were set forth, and more 
or less accepted to account for the production of the shock. ‘Thus it 
was due to solutio continui in the parts of the earth, to a sudden penning 
in of the subterraneous fires, to sulphureous and bituminous blasts, or, 
as Dr. Stukely was of opinion, to the play of lightning and thunder 
underground in manner like to that wherein they appear in our firma- 
ment. In nearly all these, Earthquakes and Eruptions are impartially 
jumbled. It is only within a very short time, that a few men in 
Europe have come to see, that while Vuncanrcrry is a word that may 
properly express the community as to causation that exists between 
