Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/76

36 no governing law, nor any indication of a prevailing direction of overturning force. It is only by first gaining some commanding point, whence a general view over the whole field of ruin can be had, and observing its places of greatest and least destruction, and then by patient examination, compass in hand, of many details of overthrow, house by house and street by street, analyzing each detail and comparing the results, as to the direction of force, that must have produced each particular fall, with those previously observed and compared, that we at length perceive, once for all, that this apparent confusion is but superficial.

We discover the cause, and in doing so obtain the key to all future correct and ready detection of the general directions of shock, by having learned to choose the proper class of buildings for our observations.

We find that wherever the ruin is complete and featureless—defying deduction—there the streets have been narrowed to five or twelve feet wide, have run winding hither and thither, ascending and descending, and that the walls of the houses, following their irregularities, have stood in every possible azimuth; that the exposed fronts and sides of the houses have faced every point of the compass; and often that the confusion produced by the shock thus reaching walls at the same moment at every conceivable angle, has been further increased by the falling houses having staggered against each other, and so some that might if alone have fallen in other ways, or might have escaped with only fissures, have been beaten to the earth by their neighbours. This sort of destruction, too, we will have remarked, belongs to the poorest habitations and worst built and densest parts of the town, where the