THE 
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
DECEMBER, 1883. 
I. EARTHQUAKES AND ELECTRICITY. 
By Colonel Arthur Parnell, late Royal Engineers. 
§ N a beautiful starlight evening towards the close of 
July, 1883, some two thousand Italians, residing or 
temporarily staying in a pleasant island in the Bay 
of Naples, were suddenly summoned to render up their 
lives. By a sharp convulsion of the earth’s surface the tall 
masonry houses of Ischia were in a few seconds transformed 
into the tombs of a great company of men, women, and 
children, whose souls passed to the nearer presence of their 
Creator through the medium of one of the most agonising 
and pitiable deaths that it is possible to conceive. Are we 
to look on this heart-rending event as simply a random 
wanton freak of Nature ? Or are we to consider it as a 
lesson especially directed to men of education and science, 
to teach them that the terrible physical plagues known as 
earthquakes are occurrences that need the most earnest 
investigation and reflection, with the .view of haply lighting 
on the means of preventing them ? Is the signal success 
that attended Jenner’s efforts to avert the dreadful pestilence 
of smallpox to be consigned to dark oblivion ? Or shall we 
endeavour to follow his footsteps by carefully examining 
the conditions and effects of earthquakes, in the hope of 
discovering their cause ? 
Within the limits of a brief paper like the present one 
scope does not exist for dealing exhaustively, or even fully, 
with the various circumstances — physical, meteorological, 
and geographical — that permeate and environ the great 
subjecft of earthquakes. But the writer trusts to be able to 
VOL. V. (THIRD SERIES). 2Z 
