Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/141

Rh Which may be Englished as follows:

With the advent of the theoretically minded European, a new era was inaugurated. A society named the Seismological Society of Japan was started in the spring of 1880, chiefly through the efforts of Professor John Milne, F.R.S., who has ever since devoted all his energies to wrestling with the problems which earthquakes, earth oscillations, earth currents, and seismic and volcanic phenomena generally, supply in such perplexing quantity. The Japanese government, too, has lent a helping hand by the establishment of a chair of seismology in the Imperial University, and of several hundreds of observing stations all over the empire,—an empire, remember, dotted with no less than fifty-one active volcanoes, and experiencing about five hundred shocks yearly.

Can earthquakes be prevented? If they cannot be prevented, can they at least be foretold? Both these questions must unfortunately be answered in the negative. Still, certain practical results have been arrived at by Mr. Milne and his fellow-workers, which are by no means to be despised. It is now possible to make what is called a "seismic survey" of any given plot of ground, and to indicate which localities will be least liable to shocks. It has also been shown that the complete isolation of the foundations of a building from the surface of the soil obtains for the building comparative immunity from damage. The reason is that the surface shakes more than the adjacent lower layers of the soil, just as, if several billiard-balls be placed in a row, an impulse given to the first one will make only the last one fly off, while those in the middle remain nearly motionless. For the same reason, it