Mr. Forster on Earthquakes — Salisbury. 187 
of course, the fright made him rush out of the office with the 
others, for safety; seeing, however, that the house was totally 
undamaged, the staff soon returned, and on examining the band 
still running from the Morse instrument, it was seen that the 
signals went wrong and ceased entirely at the moment of the 
shock. I was immediately advised of this by telephone, and 
before almost the lamps and other suspended articles had ceased 
swaying I had the cable end on my testing apparatus and local¬ 
ized a dead break at the distance already named, which was 
•equal to 25.5 cable knots, or twenty-three miles from this, the 
port of Zante. All this was absolutely defined within a few 
moments of the shock’s commencement. * * * 
“On proceeding to grapple for the broken ends, the repairing 
ship found that to the south of the break the bottom suddenly 
increased in depth from 4,500 to 5,800 feet, and slightly to the 
westward nearly 7,000 feet were found. The fault (break in 
the cable) came in from a depth of 5,800 feet.” Concerning 
this break it is further stated “that for a length of six miles 
north and south, and directly along the cable’s course, the whole 
of this level bottom (on which the cable had lain)had either slid 
over into a greater depth or had sunk by its weight over some 
cavernous spaces. I am more inclined to favor the opinion, that 
towards the westward this bank, 4,500 feet in depth had origi¬ 
nally almost as precipitous a slope into deep water as it has to 
the south, off Proti, (where the depth suddenly increased from 
4,500 to 10,000 feet) and that the cable was lying within a few 
inches of the actual margin of this bank, which fell over to¬ 
ward the west into very deep water.” Mr. Forster further 
reasons that “not a shadow of doubt exists that this landslip 
broke the cable, because it was firmly jam pied down for a con¬ 
siderable length and could not possibly be extracted, whilst the 
broken end to the south came in freely, as it lay hanging over 
the precipice at the point of subsidence; and that this landslip 
was the cause of the earthquake is also absolutely irrefutable , 
because the cable broke exactly when the shock took place, being 
dragged down by the mass of matter, or crushed by the weight 
in falling.” 
Whatever may be thought of the hypothesis which is invoked 
to explain the above phenomena, the phenomena themselves are 
striking enough. Since the publication of bis paper Mr. Forster 
