THE EARTHQUAKE IN PERU. 



THE intelligence published last Saturday is suffi- 

 cient to prove that the great earthquake which has 

 devastated Peru fully equalled, if it did not surpass, 

 the most terrible catastrophes which have ever befallen 

 that country. It presents, too, all the features which 

 have hitherto characterised earthquakes in this neigh- 

 bourhood. These are well worthy of careful study, 

 and appear to have an important bearing on the modern 

 theory of earthquakes. 



It has been commonly held that the seat of distur- 

 bance in the earthquakes which have shaken the 

 country west of the Andes has lain always at some 

 point or other beneath that range of mountains. The 

 fact that several large volcanoes are found in the 

 Cordilleras has seemed confirmatory of this view. 

 The accounts we have also of the great earthquake at 

 Riobamba in 1797, seem only explicable by supposing 

 that the seat of disturbance lay almost immediately 

 beneath that city. The inhabitants were flung verti- 

 cally upwards into the air, and to such a height that 

 Humboldt found the skeletons of many of them on the 

 summit of the hill La Culca, on the farther side of the 

 small river on which Riobamba is built. The ruins of 

 many houses were also flung to the same spot. Here, 

 therefore, was evidence of that vertical (or, as Humboldt 



