The Earthquake of October, 1863. 297 



who resides at Hardwick Parsonage, about fifteen miles due west 

 of Hereford, did not leave his telescope on the night of the quake 

 until half-past two. He was awakened by " a wonderful clat- 

 tering of doors and windows/' then went to sleep again. Mr. 

 Webb found little certainty in many of the accounts given con- 

 cerning the direction of the shock, but the balance of evidence 

 was in favour of its arrival from W.S.W. He remarks, " There 

 is the strongest discrepancy between the accounts of people 

 living in almost contiguous houses, partly from temperament, 

 I suppose, and I suspect partly from the diagonal or perpendi- 

 cular presentation of the walls ." This last observation is highly 

 important ; and presuming the concussion wave to have travelled 

 in any given line, say, from W.S.W., towards the opposite 

 point of the compass, the effects of the shock upon buildings of 

 somewhat similar height and strength would be found to vary 

 with the direction of their walls. 



An intelligent farmer's wife gave Mr. Webb the following 

 interesting particulars : — Her husband, being awake, heard the 

 sound coming, as of thunder, only not quite like thunder, 

 somewhat lighter, then the whole house trembled altogether, 

 then a door between their room and the nest was so slammed 

 to and fro, she thought her sick child on the other side was 

 attempting to open it. Her husband went to open it, and 

 found all safe, and then, but not before, came one great push at 

 the bed. 



In the neighbourhood of Clay Cross, near Chesterfield, the 

 shock was scarcely noticed, and in a letter from Charles Binns, 

 Esq., of that place, we are informed that although many men 

 were working at night in the pits and about the works, none 

 mentioned any unusual sound or motion. Mr. Binns considers 

 that it did not extend so far north of the Backbone Ridge as 

 Clay Cross and Chesterfield. 



Some observers, in what appears to have been the line of 

 principal disturbance, thought the shock came from the east- 

 ward, and others from the west, but it is very easy to be 

 mistaken in this matter. Where the local earth- structure pre- 

 sents curved beds of emergent hard rocks lying between bad 

 conducting bodies, such as soft clays or loose sand, the con- 

 cussion wave would be materially deflected ; but, notwithstanding 

 minor peculiarities, the general direction was probably from 

 some point west of south to another point east of north. The 

 Earthquake Catalogue of the British Association, published in 

 1858, states the mean horizontal direction of British earth- 

 quakes to be " from south to north, veering more or less to the 

 east or west, but having on the whole a direction passing through 

 the probable focus of the Lisbon earthquakes, and of the Canary 

 Islands." The same work informs us that 234 earthquakes are 



