FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE. 
199 
historical periods. If I remember rightly, Quintius Curtius Eufus, in 
one of the ten books which he wrote to convey to posterity the " His- 
tory of the Hci^u of Alexander the Great," says that the pilots recog- 
nised the sea by its odour, " agnoscere se auram 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 persous, 
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 
Eocem of Brussels ; they have, therefore, retained their odour for 
thousands of centuries ! 
M. Prost, who inhabits Jfice, 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 Joseplh II. and Porte de la Loi, near the Eue Montoyer, wei'e the 
first to remark it ; they thought it was the efi'ect 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. 
