372 CHARLES DARWIN 



strong testimony to the kindness with which travellers are 

 received in almost every part of South America. The next 

 day I hired some mules to take me by the ravine of Jol- 

 quera into the central Cordillera. On the second night the 

 weather seemed to foretell a storm of snow or rain, and whilst 

 lying in our beds we felt a trifling shock of an earthquake. 



The connection between earthquakes and the weather has 

 been often disputed : it appears to me to be a point of great 

 interest, which is little understood. Humboldt has remarked 

 in one part of the Personal Narrative, 1 that it would be 

 difficult for any person who had long resided in New Anda- 

 lusia, or in Lower Peru, to deny that there exists some con- 

 nection between these phenomena: in another part, however, 

 he seems to think the connection fanciful. At Guayaquil, 

 it is said that a heavy shower in the dry season is invariably 

 followed by an earthquake. In Northern Chile, from the 

 extreme infrequency of rain, or even of weather foreboding 

 rain, the probability of accidental coincidences becomes very 

 small; yet the inhabitants are here most firmly convinced of 

 some connection between the state of the atmosphere and of 

 the trembling of the ground: I was much struck by this, 

 when mentioning to some people at Copiapo that there had 

 been a sharp shock at Coquimbo : they immediately cried out, 

 " How fortunate ! there will be plenty of pasture there this 

 year." To their minds an earthquake foretold rain, as surely 

 as rain foretold abundant pasture. Certainly it did so hap- 

 pen that on the very day of the earthquake, that shower of 

 rain fell, which I have described as in ten days' time pro- 

 ducing a thin sprinkling of grass. At other times rain has 

 followed earthquakes at a period of the year when it is a 

 far greater prodigy than the earthquake itself: this happened 

 after the shock of November, 1822, and again in 1829, at 

 Valparaiso; also after that of September, 1833, at Tacna. 

 A person must be somewhat habituated to the climate of 

 these countries to perceive the extreme improbability of rain 

 falling at such seasons, except as a consequence of some law 



1 Vol. iv, p. n, and vol. ii. p. 217. For the remarks on Guayaquil, see 

 Silliman's Journ., vol. xxiv. jp. .384. For those on Tacna by Mr. Hamilton, 

 see Trans, of British Association, 1840. For those on Coseguina see Mr. 

 Caldcleugh in Phil. Trans., 1835. In the former edition I collected several 

 references on the coincidences between sudden falls in the barometer and 

 earthquakes; and between earthquakes and meteors. 



