FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE. 



199 



historical periods. If I reraember rightly, Quintius Curtius Rufus, in 

 one of the ten books which he wrote to convey to posterity the His- 

 tory of the Eeign of xilexander the Great/' says that the pilots recog- 

 nised the sea by its odour, " agnoscere se aurain maris," However, to 

 assure myself that the odour of the tertiary sea was not an illusion, I 

 immediately had the fact certified by a considerable number of persons, 

 among whom I could name some very eminent and popular men. All, 

 without exception, were delighted at the idea of their olfactory organs 

 thus launching them into the byegone ages of geological periods, and 

 marvelled at the prodigious number of years the fossils I have described 

 had retained their smell. I then made known this discovery to the 

 Paris Academy of Sciences. 



I have said that the fossils here alluded to were taken from the middle 

 Eocene of Brussels ; they have, therefore, retained their odour for 

 thousands of centuries ! 



M. Prost, who inhabits Xice, has furnished us with many observa- 

 tions on the earthquakes of Italy, and on the oscillation of the ground 

 along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Very frequent, and even violent, 

 in the year 1855, these terrible commotions became milder in 1856 ; 

 but took a new degree of intensity in the year 1857, when, on the 

 20th and 21st of August^ a strong shock was felt on the Italian and 

 African coasts. Here are, however, some curious observations recently 

 communicated to the Academy of Sciences at Brussels by the learned 

 Secretary, M. Quetelet, Director of the Brussels Observatory, and which 

 tend to show that there exists a certain relation between the magnetic 

 forces of our planet and the phenomena of earthquakes. In the fore- 

 noon of the 17th of last December," says M. Quetelet, a violent mag- 

 netic perturbation was observed by my son in the Brussels Observatory." 

 At noon the perturbation increased considerably ; the proximity of an 

 Aurora borealis was presumed to be the cause of this phenomenon, and 

 shortly afterwards the local papers spoke of the apparition of an Aurora 

 borealis, which had been seen at Brussels between five and six o'clock 

 on the morning of the 1 7th. The customs-officers stationed at the gates 

 Porte Joseph II. and Porte de la Loi, near the Eue Montoyer, were the 

 first to remark it ; they thought it was the effect of a tremendous fire 

 in some part of the town. The luminosity spread from north to south 

 across the heavens, preserving its brilliancy throughout, and detaching 

 itself gloriously from a background of cloudless sky glittering with stars. 



