NOTES ON EARTHQUAKES. 
209 
phenomena, while we have so much evidence the other 
way. There is a motion of the eartlx’s crust which lifts and 
depresses enormous tracts of land, and which, as far as we 
know, acts equably and without paroxysmal violence; but 
these movements, however equable, must always be accom- 
panied by occasional snaps and jars,” and the rending of the 
rocks in the interior of the earth. In short, the frequent 
occurrence of earthquakes such as we have lately experienced 
in England, is what, as geologists, we must expect, from our 
knowledge of volcanic phenomena, and the oscillatory move- 
ments of the crust of the globe which have happened 
throughout all geological time. 
It is not, happily, in England that we experience much of 
earthquakes and their effects. It is in volcanic regions that 
severe earthquakes occur, and there the imagination can pic- 
ture nothing more awful than their results. Mr. Mallet and 
M. Perrey, of Dijon, have catalogued systematically the differ- 
ent accounts of earthquake phenomena, and it has been calcu- 
lated that several millions of human beings have been destroyed 
by earthquakes within the last four thousand years. Whether 
they occur along the line of the Andes, in the Indian Archi- 
pelago, in Sicily, or in Portugal, “ misericordia !” is the cry, 
and fearful indeed are the devastations which are witnessed by 
the survivors of such catastrophes. 
Two hundred and fifty thousand persons were killed at the 
first earthquake of Antioch in the year 526, and sixty thou- 
sand during the second catastrophe, seventy- six years after- 
wards. In 1797, forty thousand persons perished from earth- 
quakes in Quito. Sir Charles Lyell records that one hundred 
thousand people were killed by the Sicilian earthquakes of 
1693, when the city of Catania and forty-nine other villages 
were levelled to the ground ; and it was ascertained that sixty 
thousand persons were destroyed in the course of six minutes, 
during the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755. 
One account of the effect of a severe earthquake which 
happened as lately as 1861 will suffice as an example of the 
occasional effect of such catastrophes on human life and human 
welfare. The following is the record of Major Rickards of the 
destruction of the city of Mendoza, in South America. He 
says : — 
I was absolutely struck dumb and immovable with horror at the scene 
which presented itself ! I gazed along the whole length of a street ; not a 
single house was there to be seen standing ; all was a confused mass of 
“ adobes,” beams, and bricks ! The street was filled up on a level with what 
remained of the walls of the houses on either side, which at a glance 
accounted for the fearful number of victims — upwards of 12,000 out of a 
population of 16,000 — entombed beneath the ruins on that fatal 20th of 
