298 The Earthquake of October, 1863. 



recorded as having occurred in the British Isles and Northern 

 Isles, from the 11th century to the 19th, of which 56 took place 

 in winter, 42 in spring, 52 in summer, and 67 in autumn. 



Superstition has, in all ages, made use of earthquakes by 

 exaggerating their horror, misstating their character, and 

 ascribing them to causes of an unnatural kind. Science, how- 

 ever, shows that they are phenomena continually occurring : not 

 a day passes in which many do not shake certain portions of 

 the earth, and though we are only beginning to understand the 

 laws that regulate their action, enough has been ascertained to 

 warrant the positive assertion that they are subservient to 

 purposes of order, and, strange as it may seem, belong to the 

 conservative forces operating upon our globe. 



The question, u What is an earthquake V 3 will occur to all 

 inquiring minds, and can only be approximately answered. 

 Formerly it was fancied that the earth was a sort of bottle filled 

 with a huge mass of molten matter, in an incandescent state, 

 and then earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were easily ac- 

 counted for by supposing that the fiery fluid in its expansions 

 burst more or less completely through the crust of our globe. 

 This theory was partly founded upon the hasty induction that 

 because, within small limits, descending into the earth con- 

 ducted us to a warmer region, it must continue to do so within 

 any limits, and that we should, soon come to a zone in which 

 all known substances would be melted with fervent heat; and 

 partly upon an equally unwarrantable corollary from the nebular 

 hypothesis. According to this supposition, all the globes that 

 people space were once gaseous, and gradually condensed as 

 they cooled, till, at a certain stage of the process, they were 

 composed of incandescent fluids, surrounded by a thin crust of 

 matter that had parted with sufficient heat to assume the solid 

 form. Those remarkable bodies, the nebulce, of which Mr. 

 Webb discourses so admirably, were imagined to be worlds in 

 this incipient or gaseous stage, and when the telescope resolved 

 some of them into hosts of remote and widely- separated stars, 

 bad reasoners in science said the nebular theory was overturned, 

 although it was not at all affected by the splendid discovery that 

 had thus been made. How our earth passed from earlier stages 

 to its present form we do not know, nor can we tell what those 

 stages were. If, however, the nebular theory had been proved, 

 it would not have necessarily followed that our earth had made 

 such slight advances towards solidification as to be a mere shell 

 with fluid contents. More complete research shows that we 

 know only an infinitesimal portion of tile earth's past history, 

 nil th; it its present condition is that of a very strong and solid 

 globe. Mr. Hopkins long ago showed, by mathematical in- 

 vestigation, that the earth-cimst could not be less than eight 



