﻿of the Sea not produced by Winds or Tides. 39 



Bat because no earthquake shock was felt on that day in Cali- 

 fornia, nor in New Zealand until a day or two afterwards, the 

 writer of the article in the ( Times ' of the 3rd of November, 

 beginning with m " There are earthquakes in divers places/' 

 boldly states, without referring to any authority, that " on the 

 15th of August the most terrible earthquake ever known wrecked 

 and then drowned many hundreds of miles of the South-Ame- 

 rican coast, sending a wave as far north as California, and right 

 across the Pacific (8000 miles) to our own countrymen in New 

 Zealand." This untenable hypothesis I have already fully dis- 

 proved in my last paper above referred to, which I wrote in 

 answer to a similar hypothesis advanced by Mr. Mallet, who in 

 the ' Quarterly Journal of Science' for January 1864 (p. 68) 

 states that " the great sea-wave of translation rolls in often hours 

 after the shock has done its work of destruction, or portions of 

 it may roll in upon shores that have felt no shock at all. Thus 

 in the great earthquake at Japan, which a few years ago wrecked 

 a Russian frigate in one of the harbours there, the great sea- 

 wave produced in the deep sea near those islands hours after- 

 wards reached the opposite shores of the Pacific at St. Diego and 

 Francisco." 



The writer in the ' Times ' would, I think, have given a much 

 more credible explanation of the recent agitations on the shores 

 of the Pacific, had he said that the great earthquake of the 15th 

 of August was not confined to America, but appears to have ex- 

 tended under the Pacific to New Zealand, where, although it was 

 not perceived on dry land, its submarine shocks produced move- 

 ments of the sea similar to those on the American coasts, com- 

 mencing, too, like them, wdth a retirement of the sea. 



In agreement with what I have above stated, is the following 

 extract from the e Times' of December 2, 1868, from its own 

 correspondent's letter, dated Melbourne, October 13 : — " In a 

 recent letter I referred to the great tidal wave which at various 

 hours of the 15th of August last rolled in on different parts of 

 Australia and New Zealand, doing some damage at Chatham 



Island Mr. Ellery of the Melbourne Observatory, the 



President of our Royal Society, a very scientific man, last evening 

 in answer to a question from Professor Wilson .... said he had 

 been asked to offer a few notes on the great tidal wave. . . . The 

 time of the wave was recorded at Sydney to a few seconds. It 

 was aiso pretty accurately taken at Newcastle and in New Zea- 

 land. He had reduced the time taken at those places to Mel- 

 bourne mean time; and according to that reckoning the first indi- 

 cation of the wave was at about half-past 2 of the morning of the 

 15th of August, the indication being only by the self- registering 



