66 - nt REPORT—1858. 
seismic action, or even elevation of the opposite eastern coast, which, it is 
extremely probable, may be slowly rising, just as the Scandinavian peninsula 
is doing ; and it does not seem a disproportioned supposition, that all three 
changing levels are due to the prodigious scale of volcanic action going on 
at Iceland. 
The Swedish system is another band stretching north-west from the 
great lakes to Kola Bay in Russian Lapland; and future observation may 
probably include in it the parallel chain of the Doffrefels Mountains. To 
the south we mark the broad band whose extremities are Portugal and the 
Azores, always in seismic sympathy with each other, and with which the 
band of the Canaries is in relation through Madeira, and is also more 
distinctly connected with the earthquakes of Barbary and Morocco. 
From Tunis, a narrow but intensely marked seismic band stretches up 
through Sicily and Italy, sends off a spur to the west through the Alps of 
Piedmont and Southern France, along the whole line of the Pyrenees, 
and to the northern coast of Spain ; and widening out over the central Alps, 
so as to cover a large area of central Southern Europe: extending east and 
west from Lyons to Vienna, it again contracts in width at about the latitude 
of Strasburg, and stretches away northwards over the whole Rhenish 
mountain system, and becomes nearly evanescent upon the low plains of 
Holland and the coasts of the North Sea, where, though infrequent, earth- 
quakes are not unknown. 
Over the great plain of Central Europe, and far into Southern Russia to 
the north of the Euxine, the want of observations with distinct dimensions 
renders any attempt at precise boundary nugatory. Were our records better, 
the Carpathians would no doubt stand out in stronger tint than the well- 
inhabited country of Poland and the Vistula, where the greater frequency of 
seismic records deepen the tint from Cracow up towards Riga. Better ob- 
servations would no doubt also mark with a deeper tint a band of connexion 
along the Balkans and line of the Danube, between the Austrian Alps, so 
frequently shaken, and the Bosphorus, where the neighbourhood of Con- 
stantinople shows itself abnormally intense, from the reiterated records of 
earthquakes there that have been collected century after century at that 
ancient seat of splendour and civilization. Thus it is that the disturbing 
causes that we have remarked as affecting the Catalogue follow into its dis- 
cussion in space as well as we have seen they do into that of time. 
A broad but somewhat ill-defined seismie band stretches from the Greek 
Archipelago to Constantinople, spreads over a large portion of Asia Minor, 
and is carried through Palestine, on to the valley of the Lower Nile and the 
coasts of the Red Sea, extending further south along its Arabian shore. 
From the Gulf of Scanderoon, by Aleppo and Mosul to Lake Van, and 
the south of Ararat to Shirvan and Baku upon the Caspian, a wide band 
of great and long-continued energy extends, which probably joins into the 
Caucasus and is connected with the seismic system of the Ourals in the 
distant north. 
Again, from about the parallel of Bagdad, a broad but ill-defined seismic 
band stretches nearly due east through the whole of Persia, Khorassan, and 
to the Hindoo Koosh, sending off a narrower band along the shores of the 
Persian Gulf. About Cabool the Persian band joins into the vast seismic 
area of Northern India—a band, whose northern boundary is the Hima-- 
layan chain, and which stretches nearly parallel to it from Cabool to Cal- — 
cutta and to the Gulf of Cutch. Beloochistan appears exempt, but probably — 
only because hitherto without observation or record. Leaving the vast and — 
strongly agitated seismic system of Central Asia, of the boundaries of which 
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