Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/841

Rh any member of our society who doubts the reality of God's government, but only to those who, with Dr. Martineau, regard it as the very first of all truths. But to them I say, if miracles still exist, if they still exist in the very form in which they are said to have existed in the Acts of the Apostles, if they can be attested by men of science themselves, if, in any Church, they happen not merely every year, but in considerable numbers every year, and admit of all the tests to which Mr. Stephen has referred us, then surely it can be nothing but a most reprehensible and guilty fastidiousness to give the go-by to the evidence of these things, simply on the ground that they are mixed up with a great deal of vulgar taste and of hysterical feeling. Is it not better to have a vulgar belief in God than to have a fine susceptibility to scientific methods? Is it not better to have a feverish longing to do his will than to have a delicate distaste for morbid devotion? The uniformity of Nature is the veil behind which, in these latter days, God is hidden from us. I believe in the uniformity of Nature, but I believe in it far more fervently as the background on which miracle is displayed than I do merely as the fertile instrument of scientific discovery and of physical amelioration.—Nineteenth Century.



INCE communication between the extremities of the earth has become both easy and rapid, our ideas on many subjects have been modified and have become more precise. Facts that formerly appeared singular and extraordinary are recognized as frequent and habitual. This is the case with reference to earthquakes. Numerous telegrams, a few months ago, told in every part of the civilized world of the shocks from which Andalusia, in Spain, was suffering. To the astonishment and lively curiosity which these phenomena excited was added a deep emotion which disasters of so dramatic and painful a character would cause. The interest in the study of these things is also enhanced by the additional knowledge it gives us respecting the constitution of the crust of the earth—knowledge which, constantly increasing, enables us the better to comprehend the different parts of the mechanism of these subterranean perturbations.

Among the more recent earthquakes was the one that destroyed most of the Island of Scio. On the 3d of April, 1881, about an hour and forty minutes after noon, the city of Scio and thirty or forty villages in the southern part of the island were disturbed with a violent trepidation. The shaken and cracked houses were still standing, when, a few minutes afterward, a second shock, equally violent, came 