EARTHQUAKE WEATHER

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21111, 12 March 1934, Page 7

EARTHQUAKE WEATHER

•io mi mituk or mi fiicss Sir,—lt demands some temerity to query the pronouncement of a professor; yet when I question a definite assurance by Professor Speight in his interesting comments on earthquakes in "The Press" of Friday, he may concede that I am only indulging in the same kind of scepticism as underlies that assurance. He declared that the popular belief in "earthquake weather" was "pure Imagination" and "no more than a coincidence" and I would suggest that the failure of science to establish any connexion between earthquakes and weather cannot be accepted as a proof that there is no such connexion. That connexion may yet be established; and in the meantime the popular belief, which has the sanction of generations of experience, will persist. Does not Professor Speight give his

cum: away when he status that it is possible "that changes of barometric pressure might have some contributory effect on earthquakes?" The unscientific mind, groping for explanation by the light of experience, has noted the simple fact that very often an earthquake occurs when a heaviness seems to brood over the earth. And so he concludes that, if the earthquake docs not cause the weather, nor the weather the earthquake, there must be some subtle connexion between them, which science has not yet been able to explain. It will not do for science to dismiss that conclusion as a superstition until it is able to speak with much more of exact knowledge than it claims at present. The belief in •'earthquake weather" does not postulate that only in such weather do earthquakes occur. I take it that it only assumes that, if the earth or certain parts of it are in a state of uncertain erratic equilibrium, the barometric pressure may quite easily be the deciding factor.—Yours, etc., SCEPTIC. March 11. ItKR