Mr. Forster on Earthquakes — Salisbury. 185 
rolling ap to Zante from the south, lasting nearly forty seconds. 
It 'began with a very slight force, gradually increasing to a 
fairly smart shock, and then died away. * * * Soon 
after this we observed that the hitherto perfect cable betweeji 
Zante and the island of Crete appeared to be faulty, thus inter- 
fering with the work, and when the next morning a clerk pro- 
ceeded to the Cauea cable-house to arrange for my tests, I found 
that, although not entirely broken, it had been very seriously 
damaged." The sea bottom where this injury to the cable oc- 
currt d is exceedingly irregular. Outside Sapienza, to the north, 
the sea has an average depth of only 700 feet, but a little to the 
westward "it suddenly falls into 4,000, and even into 10,000 
feet." * * * '"For a space of about 150 square miles 
there appears to be a vast depression, averaging 9,000 feet in 
depth, rising abruptly and precipitously towards the coast line. 
It was in the center of this depression that our repairing ship 
found the extraordinary difference of 1,500 feet between the 
boTV and stern soundings." In this instance Mr. Forster thinVs 
til at "a considerable mass of matter had fallen directly upon it, 
(the cable) as the subsidence came shelving down from, some 
2,000 feet into a depth of 8,000, and had crushed it without 
actually fracturing it." 
4. "On December 7th, 1885, a long undulating shock, of 
slight intensity, was felt in Zante and its direction was decidedly 
from the west northwest. Just after the shock our Zante- 
Corfu cable, which passes along the channel dividing Zante 
from Cephalonia and thence out to the westward of the latter 
island, was found to be faulty, the fault being within one mile 
of the Zante shore, off Cape Krionaro, in a depth of only about 
300 feet of water. The cable was not entirely broken, but either 
badly crushed or strained by an uprising, or more probably by 
a subsidence of the bottom in our old earthquake ground, in 
the channel between the northwest of Zante and the southeast 
of Cephalonia. It eventually, however, gave out, as in the pre- 
vious cases, and it was found advisable, on repairing it, to lay 
in a new shore end of one knot, up to and beyond the fracture. 
Whilst waiting for the arrival of our repairing ship I ex- 
amined the cable from a boat with the aid of a sea telescope, as 
it lay on the bottom of the sea, the water being very clear, and 
I followed it for a distance of about 400 or 500 yards from the 
