324 Reviews — Milne Sf Burton's Great Earthquake in Japan. 



have been produced. Similarly we can conceive of subterranean 

 explosions as the producers of earthquakes. Certainly the fact that 

 many earthquakes occur in volcanic countries, and near the ocean 

 where we therefore have both heat and moisture, support such a view." 



"The great disturbance which we illustrate, occurred about the 

 centre of Japan, in the Prefectures of Aichi and Gifu. The severely 

 shaken district, in many portions of which the destruction of 

 buildings and engineering works was complete, extends over 4200 

 square miles. The area in which brick buildings were affected 

 reached as far as Tokyo to the east, and Kobe to the west, or over 

 an extent of country of 4400 square miles. The disturbance was, 

 howevei', felt from Sendai in the north to Nagasaki in the South, or 

 over an area of 92,000 square miles, and had Japan been surrounded 

 by land instead of water, the land ai'ea shaken would have been 

 alDOut 400,000 squai'e miles. Delicate instruments may possibly 

 have been affected at the Antipodes. Effects were noticed in Shanghi." 



" If we were asked whether the Gifu-Nagoya plain was a place 

 where earthquakes were frequent, we must repl}' in the affirmative. 

 In Japan there are some seven hundred stations where earthquakes 

 are observed, and from several of them situated on the Gifu plain 

 we find that, in the six years from 1885 to 1890 the number of 

 shocks recorded in that district were respectively, 9, 4, 10, 12, 15, 

 and 36 ; whilst in the corresponding years in Tokyo, where accurate 

 records are taken with seismographs, the numbers were 51, 55, 80, 

 101, 115, and 93." 



" Standing on one of the hills, which form the margin of the 

 devastated area, a vast plain, covered with rice-fields dotted with 

 clumps of trees and hamlets, and streaked with the silvery bands of 

 the four great rivers which cross it, stretches as far as eye can reach. 

 From the western side of this plain — which supports a population of 

 perhaps 800 to the square mile — one sees towards the south the 

 islets and promontories of Owari Bay, before one the turrets of 

 the castles rising through the blue smoke of Nagoya and Ogaki, 

 beyond which comes the gently sloping uplands forming foothills to 

 dark green mountains." 



" The Nagoya-Gifu plain is one of Japan's great gardens, but it has 

 been devastated. A disturbance occurred in the iMino mountains, 

 and at once an area, greater than that of the Empire of Japan, 

 became a sea of waves, the movements being magnified on the 

 surface of the soft alluvial plains. In Tokyo, more than two 

 hundred miles from the centre of the disaster, the ground moved 

 in long easy undulations, producing in some persons dizziness and 

 nausea, the movement being not unlike what we might expect \ipon 

 a raft rising and falling on an ocean swell. Near to its origin the 

 waves were short and rapid, cities were overturned, the ground was 

 fissured, small mud volcanoes were created, and the strongest 

 engineering structures were ruined. About ten thousand people 



