President's A ddress. 
115 
Tlie vertical movement, similar to that of a mine, threw 
the bodies of many of the inhabitants to a height of several 
hundred feet on to the hill of La Cullca. By the rotatory 
movement, walls were changed in their direction without 
being overthrown ; straight and parallel rows of trees were 
inflected ; and in fields having two sorts of cultivation, one 
crop even took the place before occupied by the other ; this 
last phenomenon showing either a movement of translation, 
or a mutual penetration of different portions of the ground. 
Baron Humboldt, to whom we are indebted for this interest- 
ing narrative, states that when making a plan of the ruined 
city of Kiobamba, he was shown a place where the whole 
furniture of one house had been found under the remains of 
another ; the earth had evidently moved like a fluid in 
streams, of which we must assume that the direction was 
first downwards, then horizontal, and lastly again upwards. 
Humboldt distinctly ascertained that this great earthquake 
was unaccompanied by any noise ; the great subterranean 
detonation which was heard at the cities of Quito and 
Ibarra — but not at Tacunga and Hambato, which were 
nearer the centre of movement — occurred eighteen or twenty 
minutes after the catastrophe. It is but right to state that 
Mr Mallet, in his Eeport to the British Association on Earth- 
quake Phenomena, maintains that there is no direct evidence 
from any observed facts for assuming any vorticose motion 
of the shock of an earthquake, or any other than a rectilinear 
one. According to Mallet, Humboldt has fallen into the 
greater error of mistaking the secondary effects of landslips, 
and their twistings of the land, for those of vorticose motion. 
— Bep. Brit. Assoc., 1850. Mallet ascribes the immediate 
impulses producing earth-waves of shock to — 
1st, The sudden formation of steam from water previously 
in a state of repulsion from the heating surfaces (known as 
the spheroidal state), and which may or may not be again 
suddenly condensed under pressure of sea-water ; 
2di To the evolution of steam through fissures, and its 
irregular and per saltum condensation under pressure of 
sea-water ; 
3(i, To great fractures and dislocations in the rocky crust, 
VOL. III. Q 
