Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/228

218 aspect of the calamity was that it had not come years before. And the providential lesson would seem to be that laws of matter are laws of God, and cannot be violated with impunity.

When the earthquake wellnigh [sic] swallowed up Peru, five or six years ago, men stood aghast at the mysterious dispensation. But Heaven has not only always declared that tropical countries are liable to earthquakes, but had taught the Peruvians through hundreds of years to expect two earthquakes in a century, travelling in cycles from forty to sixty years apart. The citizens of Africa have not only this general instruction, but that special warning which Nature always gives. A great light appeared to the southeast. Hollow sounds were heard. The dogs, the goats, even the swine, foresaw the evil, and hid themselves. But the simple men passed on and were punished.

Before the Alpine freshets come, the streams are coffee-colored. Even the tornadoes of the tropics, which are instantaneous in their swoop, so plainly announce themselves to old sailors, that they reef sails and save ship and life, while only the heedless perish. The simoom gives such certain and invariable warnings that the caravan is safe if it be wary.

Herculaneum and Pompeii were built too far up the mountain. And that the builders knew quite as well as the excavators of the splendid ruins know it now. But they chose to take the risk. And to-day their cheerful compatriots gather their heedless vintage and sit beneath their perilous vines still nearer to the deadly crater. St. Petersburg has been three times inundated, and after each most fatal calamity processions filled the streets and masses were said to propitiate the mysterious anger of God. Peter the Great, who built the city, was the successor of Canute. He ordered the Gulf of Kronstadt to retire, and then set down his capital in the swamps of the verge of the Neva. Whenever the river breaks up with the spring-floods, the trembling citizens are at sea in a bowl. Only three times has the bowl broken, so much money and skill have been expended upon it. But when a March gale shall drive the tide back upon the river, swollen and terrible with drifting ice, drowned St. Petersburg will be the pendant for burned Chicago.

Modern science has brought the world a fifth gospel. In it we read that God commands us to give him our whole heads as well as our whole hearts, for that we cannot know him nor obey him till we discern him in every minutest fact, and every immutable law of the physical universe, as in every fact and law of the moral. It is barely two hundred years since the great Cotton Mather preached a famous sermon called "Burnings Bewailed," wherein he attributed a terrible conflagration to the wrath of God kindled against Sabbath-breaking and the accursed fashion of monstrous periwigs! [sic] For years after his time the Puritan colonies held fasts for mildew, for small-pox, for caterpillars, for grasshoppers, for loss of cattle by cold and visitation of