Eminent Living Geologists — Professor John Milne. 389 



met with a hearty response. General van Buren presided, and the 

 large hall was crowded with several hundred Japanese and foreigners. 

 The world's first seismological society was formed that evening — the 

 Seismological Society of Japan — and it has done the pioneer work, as 

 well as having been the most active and useful. It at once enrolled 

 about 300 members, with Mr. J. Hattori as president and Professor 

 Milne as honorary secretary. For fifteen years Milne held that office, 

 and directed the Society's work ; the results are shown in its twenty 

 volumes of reports, now known to seismologists all the world over, 

 containing as they do the groundwork of the subject. 



The Japanese Government soon saw the wisdom of encouraging the 

 new science, and it established an Earthquake Committee, which it 

 still supports with an annual subsidy on an average of $10,000 per 

 annum, reaching in some years as high as $25,000. Wherever there 

 is a considerable earthquake, there by the first boat goes a seismologist, 

 an engineer, and an architect, and every phase of the disturbance and 

 its after-effect is carefully studied and a report prepared. At the 

 present day there are 968 stations scattered all over the Japanese 

 Empire where these movements are recorded, a special bureau to 

 which the reports are sent and analysed, and a chair of Seismology 

 established at the Imperial University. The first to be appointed 

 was Professor Milne, who occupied the chair of Seismology until he 

 left for England in 1895. 



The greatest earthquake which occurred during Professor Milne's 

 residence in Japan (1876—95) was that of 1891. "It occurred," 

 says Milne, " at six in the morning. I got into the open in time to 

 see the next house tumbling to pieces. This was in the capital, where 

 the Imperial Hotel was ruined, and the University buildings con- 

 siderably damaged ; but the worst effects were further south. Nine 

 thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight persons lost their lives, and 

 the number injured exceeded a hundred thousand. Railways and 

 bridges were destroyed, 400 miles of river and canal embankments 

 smashed, and the sides of mountains fell out and formed lakes by 

 damming up the rivers. The Government spent thirty millions of 

 dollars in relief works and repairing damages ; and as the earth- 

 quake just lasted 30 seconds, it may be said to have cost the 

 Government alone a million a second." 



Fewer large earthquakes have occurred since 1891 — one at Tokyo 

 (1894) cost twenty-six lives, and another in the northern provinces 

 killed about three hundred people. That at Kamaishi in 1896, 

 which caused a loss of thirty thousand lives, is said to have been due 

 to enormous tidal waves which swept the coast. These waves 

 are not uncommon off Japan. In 1855 one partially destroyed the 

 town of Shimoda, where Perry landed and got his treaty ; and in 

 1868 and again in 1877 such seaquake waves were felt along the 

 coast of Japan from north to south, rising and falling at short intervals 

 like an ordinary tide, only vastly bigger ; they were due to earthquakes 

 in South America. Disasters like that at Kamaishi probably owe 

 their origin to disturbances close to the coast, and therefore the waves 

 rushed in with greater violence. They may have been caused either 

 by a submarine eruption or a gigantic landslip at the bottom of the 



