Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/380

364 of observation so widely separated corresponded. Japanese, Indian, and American earthquakes could be simultaneously studied in Italy, Russia, Germany, and England; and thus a new, hitherto undeveloped field was gained, the scope of which has already extended far beyond its merely geological aspect.

This could have happened only through another advance that has been made in our century, which has first rendered a real seismology, a scientific knowledge of the seismic conditions of the earth, possible through the immense development of technics, by which a system of instrumental observation of earthquakes was established. Only through this could the acquisitions of recent times be utilized. While formerly observations were macroscopic and touched only earthquakes that could be directly felt, they now cover essentially microscopic tremors of the earth's crust, of less than a thousandth of a millimetre, that are wholly imperceptible to human senses; and we can read them, enlarged at our pleasure, on our photographically registering seismometers. We already had instruments which correctly indicated the time of the beginning and possibly the direction of a shock; but we needed and have invented new instruments—various sorts of horizontal and vertical pendulums—for the observation and representation of the whole course of the movement. The vertical indicating instruments are much used in Italy, and the horizontal ones almost exclusively in England, Japan, and Germany. The horizontal pendulum was invented in Germany in 1832 by Hengler, adapted to scientific use by Professor Zöllner, of Leipsic, and afterward applied in that form by English, German, and other observers. The most complete shape and the one best adapted to extremely delicate seismic observations was given to it by the late German astronomer and geographer Dr. Ernst von Rebeur Paschnitz, of Merseburg. Having undergone a few small changes, fixed in a threefold combination it serves as our most sensitive and accurate seismometer. Its movements and its very exact time markings are photographically represented. The pendulum box is only forty centimetres in diameter. In consequence of its convenience and cheapness, its self-action and its serviceability, it is becoming adopted more and more generally as an international instrument.

Microseismic investigation and its wide extension over the earth have raised seismology another step during the last twenty years, so that it may be said that really exact seismic research began with it. Modern seismology has confirmed many of the older results, such as the localization of earthquakes on the shores of the Pacific, the Mediterranean and in the mountain chains of the earth, and also the importance of homoseists and the epicenter. It has, on the other hand, greatly modified the former estimates of the velocity of propagation