On these, my unripe musings, told so well.
[EARTHQUAKES—ISCHIA AND JAVA.]
PHENOMENA AND PROBABLE CAUSES.
These violent convulsions that from time to time shake and rend the earth, are among the most terrible calamities that come upon men, causing immense destruction of property and of life. Their occurrence is often most unexpected.
Villages, cities, and whole districts of densely populated countries sink beneath a sudden stroke, overwhelmed in a common ruin. If any warning is given, the alarming premonitions rather confuse and paralyze effort, because, with the appalling certainty of disaster, there is nothing to show in what form it will come, or to indicate a place of refuge.
While the recent horrors at Ischia and in Java excite much painful interest in the public mind, they naturally recall similar scenes of other years. Earthquakes of less destructive violence are very frequent, and suggest greater power than is exerted. Even the slight trembling, or vibratory motions, that produce no material injury, remind us of the prodigious forces that may at any moment burst their barriers with great violence.
In every perceptible shock we feel the mighty pulsations of the agitated molten mass whose waves dash against the walls that restrain them; or the struggling of compressed elastic gases, that must have vent, though their escape rend the earth. The crust between us and the seas of fire, whose extent no man knoweth, may be in places weakening, cut away, as the inner walls of a furnace by the molten metal; so the danger may be nearer and greater than is known or feared. A devout man finds refuge and a comfortable assurance in the truth, “The Lord reigneth; in his hands are the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills is his also.”
There are records of earthquakes more ancient than any books written by men. They antedate the earliest chapters of human history, and probably belonged to the pre-adamite earth. If no human ear heard their tread, the footprints are still visible. In all mountainous regions the evidence of their upheaval by some mighty force is too plain to be doubted. The marine fossils found far up on their heights, the position of strata, often far from horizontal, with immense fissures, and chasms of unknown depth, all tell of disturbances that may have taken place before the historic period. If in those primitive times mountains were literally carried into the midst of the sea, and vast tracts of the ocean’s bed shoved up thousands of feet, it was only a more terrible display of the gigantic powers still in action, and of whose workings the centuries have borne witness.
No country seems to have escaped these terrible visitations, though some suffer more than others. Volcanoes being of the same origin, they are more frequent in volcanic regions, and perhaps by their shocks the seething caldrons have been uncovered.