1864. | — Matrur on Earthquakes. 59 
Earthquakes and Volcanoes, yet that these must be treated and inves- 
tigated up to a certain point as distinct, and that Sxrsmonocy shall 
express the system of doctrines of the former, and VuLcanoxoey that 
of the latter. 
There are a few bright points of observant thought to be found 
amidst all this “ old world” muddle, however. 
Fromondi, who wrote, in 1525, six books on Meteorology, and 
devotes the fourth to Earthquakes, refers to the explosion of the great 
Fire Ship, by which the beleagured Antwerpers blew up the Duke of 
Parma’s bridge over the Scheldt, of which Mottley has given so spirit- 
stirring an account in his ‘ History of the Revolt of the Netherlands.’ 
Fromondi remarks, that the blow of its explosion was felt almost all 
over Holland ; and he seizes upon the analogy between the effects and 
those of Earthquakes; but he soon loses the train of thought that had 
thus so well broken cover. 
Maggio, of Bologna, in 1571, was the first who made any attempt 
to collect and classify into eleven, the signs or presages of Harth- 
quakes, not with much light, it must be confessed, as he put Eclipses 
and Comets amongst “the eleven.” 
Then, just about a century later, came Travagini, to whom belongs 
the credit of the first attempt to found a Physical Theory of Earth- 
quake movements, and whose disquisitions present a notable example 
of how aman may go coasting along very near to a great truth, and 
yet never touch it. 
He had experienced a horrible Earthquake in 1667 at Ragusa— 
seismically a very ugly region, being that where the great seismic band 
which stretching away westward from Varna and Constantinople along 
the Balkan, crosses the Adriatic,* and joins on to the great Italian 
band at Gargano and Melfi, and a place still subject to frequent and 
violent disturbance. 
That the shock was due to some kind of impulse or blow, and that 
the force was in some sort dispersive, is all of truth that can be said to 
have been seen clearly by Travagini, though he was close to a great 
deal more. 
Hooke, in 1690, delivered his ‘ Discourses of Earthquakes,’ before 
the Royal Society. These Lectures, though called so, are, in fact, 
a diffuse sort of system of Physical Geology, and full of suggestive 
thoughts ; but Hooke throughout loses sight of what an Earthquake 
really is, and confounds all descriptions and sources and degrees 
of elevatory forces and their effects, with the transient action and 
secondary effects of Earthquakes properly defined. These Lectures 
have been the mine from which numberless later Geological authors 
have more or less consciously drawn, and while they are a repertory 
of curious and often valuable thought and information, they have 
done great mischief in being one of the main causes of the same con- 
fusion of ideas between the effects of Land Elevation, and those of 
Earthquake, which is not even yet cleared out of Geological systematic 
authors. 
In 1760, the Rev. John Mitchell, Fellow of Queen’s, Cambridge, 
* See Map D, ‘ Report to Royal Society on Neapolitan Earthquakes of 1857.’ 
