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Rh amusement of members of the Imperial Family. Being thus modern in origin, and requiring an extensive park with large and quiet sheets of water for its pursuit, this sport has scarcely been taken up beyond the Imperial circle, except by one or two millionaire families who occasionally invite their friends to a battue. Catching ducks as one would catch butterflies must be good fun, and is said to require not a little skill.

Hawking, which was a favourite pursuit of the Japanese nobility in the Middle Ages, is still sometimes practised on the same occasions. In fact, the new sport of duck-hunting would seem to have developed out of the old one of hawking, while it was partly suggested by the fact that large numbers of ducks and other migratory water-fowl habitually come down from the north to spend the winter on the lagoons around Tōkyō and in the castle moats.

 Earthquakes and Volcanoes. "Oh! how I wish I could feel an earthquake!" is generally among the first exclamations of the newly-landed European. "What a paltry sort of thing it is, considering the fuss people make about it!" is generally his remark on his second earthquake (for the first one he invariably sleeps through). But after the fifth or sixth he never wants to experience another; and his terror of earthquakes grows with length of residence in an earthquake-shaken land, such as Japan has been from time immemorial. Indeed, geologists tell us that much of Japan would never have existed but for the seismic and volcanic agency which has elevated whole districts above the ocean by means of repeated eruptions.

The cause of earthquakes remains obscure. The learned incline at present to the opinion that the causes may be many and various; but the general connection between earthquakes and volcanoes is not contested. The "faulting" which results from elevations and depressions of the earth's crust, the infiltration of water to great depths and the consequent generation of steam, the caving in of subterranean hollows hollows themselves 