March 29, 1888] 



NATURE 



523 



confirmed, we must recognize that the discovery of Franz 

 Joseph's Land was but a first step towards the discovery of the 

 Arctic archipelagoes which undoubtedly exist under and within 

 the 80th degree of latitude. P- A, K. 



EARTHQUAKES IN THE LEVANT^ 



THE Island of Zante, in the Ionian Group, to the north-west 

 of the Gulf of Arcadia, is a centre from which no 

 fewer than seven submarine cables radiate, and Mr. Forster 

 has taken advantage of his position as manager of the station 

 to make some interesting observations of the connection 

 between interruptions of the cables and the occurrence of earth- 

 quakes, which are more frequent, he says, in the Levant than in 

 any other part of the world, except Japan. The notes of what 

 he has himself observed are valuable and suggestive, but un- 

 fortunately he has made them a peg on which to hang a theory 

 that the " true and only reason for seismic disturbances "is that 

 landslips and subsidences occur in ocean beds. Soundings of 

 the bed of the Mediterranean, made chiefly in the interest of 

 cable-laying, have brought to light extraordinarily rapid variations 

 of depth. In one case, Mr. Forster tells us, the repairing ship 

 of his company found a difference of 1500 feet between the bow 

 and stern soundings. " We know of mushroom-shaped moun- 

 tain ranges, abrupt and precipitous table-lands, immense mar- 

 ginal shdves and overhanging cliffs. . . . We know by 

 'soundings that many of these tottering masses are hanging 

 over precipices from 3000 to 5000 feet in height, and that 

 the erosion of the water at the base of the inverted cone-shaped 

 rocks eventually causes them to slide over." Mr, Forster 

 admits that a secondary cause of earthquakes maybe ^'explo- 

 sions owing to the filtration of water through the crevices and 

 chasms that a denudation of so large an extent must necessarily 

 cause." He has done good service in drawing attention to a 

 cause of earthquakes which seismologists may have been dis- 

 posed to under-rate, but he overstates his case outrageously in 

 making this explanation cover every example. "I am pre- 

 pared, of course," he says, " to encounter a torrent of objections 

 to the acceptation of my theory as the sole cause of seismic 

 disturbances" {sic), and this is well. 



By way of supporting the theory he has written a long, 

 rambling, inconsequent pamphlet, the manner and matter of 

 which we may illustrate by quoting a paragraph that is neither 

 better nor worse than its neighbours : — 



"If, therefore, we are to believe that the process of cooling 

 our planet, which began so many thousands of centuries ago, 

 is gradually and surely condensing the nucleus of liquid or 

 solid fire in its centre, it is reasonable to assume that the bed 

 of the Mediterranean, by virtue of its more recent formation, 

 should be more subject to thi effects of the contraction of the 

 upper crust than other parts which have gone through these 

 periods already ; because it is evident that the contraction which 

 originally commenced began equally so over the whole surface 

 of the earth's sub-crust, and was, through some unknown reason, 

 abruptly suspended in certain parts which only subsided and 

 very suddenly when the cooling action was once more renewed, " 



Or this, which the author himself puts in italics : — 



"... The severity of the concussion is ahvciys precisely pro- 

 portionate to the bulk of the falling miss, the depth of its fall, 

 and the nature of the matter constituting it, and on to -which it 

 falls. ..." 



We commend the following to the attention of electricians, 

 as coming from one of their own number : — 



" By ' freeing ' a cable, it is understood that the end opposite 

 to the testing-station is detached from the apparatus and left 

 free in the air ; and, provided the cable be electrically perfect, 

 no deflection of the magnetic needle will appear at the testing- 

 office when the cable is joined up through a delicate galvano- 

 meter to ' earth.' If, however, the cable thus insulated is lying 

 near to or in the direct radius of a volcano, or near to any hot 

 springs, the increased temperature would cause a thermopile to 

 be set up, and by induction through the insulating material its 

 presence would be plainly manifest." 



I "Seistmlogy: a Paper on Earthquakes in General; together with a 

 New TheDry of their Origin, developed by the Introduction of Submarine 

 Telegraphy." By W. G. Forster, Manager and Electrician to the Eastern 

 Telegraph Co:lloa^y, Zante. Deiicated, by Special Authority, to His 

 Majesty George* I., King of the Hellenes. Pp. 63. (London: Waterlow 

 and Sins, 1887.) 



The fact that in certain earthquakes the author made this test 

 and found no current, is used as an argument to show the 

 " absolutely local nature " of what in another place he calls the 

 ^'centri" of the shocks. 



What is of real value are his positive observations of certain 

 cases where the rupture of a cable or the production of a bad 

 fault in it took place at the moment an earthquake occurred, and 

 of cases where, when the cable came to be repaired, the contour 

 of the ocean bed was found to have undergone a distinct change, 

 the cable being, in more than one instance, actually buried 

 below the new surface. The great earthquake which destroyed 

 Filialra in August 1886, shook the telegraph office at Zante 

 so sharply that the clerk rushed out. On returning to his Morse 

 instrument, he found, by the paper band which was still run- 

 ning, that a message coming from Candia had been interrupted at 

 the time of the shock, and tests taken immediately after showed 

 a dead break 23 miles from Zante. Other cables, following a 

 more northerly course, were not disturbed. In another instance 

 a cable was broken at once in two places, 2 miles apart, ap- 

 parently by a subsidence of the ground between. Once, when 

 the Zante-Trepito cable was broken by an earthquake 7 

 miles from Zante, the repairing ship discovered " that the break 

 had occurred in a depth of about 2000 feet of water, where 

 about 1400 feet originally existed, and it was impossible to haul 

 in the broken end, firmly jammed down by the mass which had 

 fallen over and upon it." 



If Mr. Forster had contented himself with telling the story of 

 facts like these, which have come within his own observation, 

 the seismologist would have felt nothing but gratitude. But 

 these grains of wheat are only reached after wading through an 

 intolerable deal of wordy chaff. The gist of the pamphlet is to 

 be found in the last fifteen or twenty pages, and we advise the 

 reader who wishes to save his patience to go to them at once. 

 We conclude by quoting an interesting passage where Mr. Forster 

 describes two natural phenomena of Cephalonia, about which 

 one would like to know more : — 



"Not far from Lizuri, which is on the western side of the 

 Bay of Argostoli, is a moving rock which, unchanged by the 

 roughest or the calmest sea, rocks to and fro with the regularity 

 of a pendulum. It is separated from a fixed mass of rock 

 against which it opens and shuts in its perpetual motion ; at one 

 time it will jam a knife placed in the crevice, from which, in a few 

 seconds, extraction is impossible, whilst the next moment you 

 can easily insert your bent hand when its maximum aperture has 

 bsen reached. This phenomenon has been carefully examined 

 by many scientific men ; divers have been sent below to ascer- 

 tain if it be the result of a detached rock from a neighbouring 

 cliff having fallen on to another, and thus becoming very 

 finely balanced, as all logan stones usually are. However, it 

 was not only shown to be a perfectly solid rock, but it does not 

 require the motion of the water to sway it, as so often we find it 

 erroneously stated, the motive power for swaying it being fur- 

 nished from an absolutely inexplicable cause. Nearly opposite 

 to this rocking stone the other remarkable phenomenon is to be 

 found, consisting of a body of water, equal in bulk to about half 

 a million gallons per day, running in from the sea at four 

 points on the coast somewhat rapidly for a certain distance until 

 it gradually becomes sucked into the earth and disappears. By 

 conducting the water into an artificial canal for a few yards, and 

 by collecting the four points of supply into one, enough motive 

 power is obtained to drive two mills. The stream, after being 

 thus utilized, is allowed to follow its own course, and is lost 

 among the rocks. . . . [It] has no visible outlet." 



THE MINERAL CONCRETION OF THE TEAK 

 TREE} 



AT the last meeting of the Nilgiri Natural History Society 

 Mr. Lawson showed a specimen of a whitish mineral sub- 

 stance found in a teak tree growing in the Government Plantation 

 at Nilambur. This peculiar secretion is not altogether unknown 

 to officers in the Forest Department, and its composition has on 

 more than one occasion been investigated by chemists. 



In 1870 the fact of calcareous masses occurring in timber was 

 brought to the notice of the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Mr. R. 

 V. Stoney, who stated {vide P.A.S.B., May 1S70, p. 135) that 

 many trees in Orissa had pieces of limestone or calcareous tufa 



^ A Paper read by David Hooper at a meeting of the Nilgiri Natural 

 H'st:)ry Society, Ootacamuiid, November 7, 1887. 



