Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/271

Rh earthquake. That, however, is pure conjecture. What is interesting is, that a certain blank consternation seems always to be the characteristic herald of an earthquake, as well as the characteristic result. That it should be the characteristic result is, of course, no wonder. The very condition of human life is the solidity of the not very thick earth-crust on which we live, and when that solidity is exchanged for positive fluidity, as it is in the worst earthquakes, it is natural enough that stupefaction should be the result. In one of the Calabrian earthquakes, it was discovered that large pieces of ground had so changed places that a plantation of mulberry-trees had been carried into the middle of a corn-field and there left, and a field sown with lupines had been carried out into the middle of a vineyard. The Italian lawsuits which resulted from this liquefaction of "real" property may be easily imagined. Still stranger in the earthquake in Riobamba in 1797, Alexander von Humboldt found that the whole furniture of one house had been buried beneath the ruins of the next house. "The upper layer of the soil, formed of matter not possessing a great degree of coherency, had moved like water in running streams, and we are compelled to suppose that those streams flowed first downward, and at last rose upward. The motion in the shocks which were experienced in Jamaica (July 7, 1692) must have been not less complicated. According to the account of an eye-witness, the whole surface of the ground had assumed the appearance of running water. The sea and land appeared to rush on one another, and to mingle in the wildest confusion. Some persons who, at the beginning of the calamity, had escaped into the streets and to the squares of the town, to avoid the danger of being crushed under the ruins of the falling houses, were so violently tossed from one side to the other that many of them received severe contusions, and some were maimed. Others were lifted up, hurled through the air, and thrown down at a distance from the place where they were standing. A few who were in town were carried away to the seashore, which was rather distant, and then thrown into the sea, by which accident, however, their lives were saved." Such a liquefaction of all that is most solid in our world seems a grim enough realization of the prayer of the prophet: "O that thou wouldst rend the heavens, that thou wouldst come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence," for the mountains do really flow down in earthquakes, but the effect of that flowing is a consternation such as no other phenomenon of physical life, not even the worst darkness of volcanic eruptions, ever produces. The loss of everything stable at the basis of human life is the collapse of the ordinary foundations even of the spiritual life itself, though, if that life has got its roots firmly into the heart, the original foundations may fall away without impairing the vitality of that which at first had propped itself upon them. But, where this is not the case, nothing tends more to that truest Nihilism—which, so far from thinking it