PATEA COUNTY MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday,Thursday, and Saturday. TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 1881. EARTHQUAKES.

Patea Mail, 28 June 1881, Page 2

PATEA COUNTY MAIL PUBLISHED Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 1881. EARTHQUAKES .

Another earthquake was felt, along this Coast about 5-20 on Sunday morning. It was a prolonged shake, but not severe; and was more interesting than alarming; The tremor was slow and regular, lasting nearly a minute. People awoke to feel their beds rocking with easy motion, as if old Atlas were getting, weak in his legs with carrying a globe so heavy with wickedness. An earthquake is like tbe ; wind which bloweth where it listeth : we know not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. There was a great earthquake foretold in the Old Country once upon a, time, and it became the.fashion for ladies to prepare earthquake gowns. No suitable preparation seems to have been made for the shake last Sunday. . There may be said to be utility in earthquakes of a well-conducted sort, for they shake people up to a livelier Sense of the awful forces which govern the , universe, impressing a wholesome lesson of the littleness of human affairs, and the necessity of paying debts in good time. Among all the patent medicines, that: cure everything, we have never found a : cure for earthquakes. Eclipses and shooting stars have been brought under scientific regulation, and even lire getting into regular habits : it seems an oversight, therefore, to allow earth-

i tremors to go on in the old erratic way. It would be a point ? gained it these quakes could be set downrih the nluiaijapj.i aiding- wlth' HGld'Mobre, who has been dead a long time but continues to publish his almanac, might consider thp.r about including < th|| quakes among his weather prophecies. Local earthquakes ought to be • “ returned ” in parliamentary statistics as among the products of a district. This earthquake last Sunday came, like other .good...things, from Taranaki-nnd Atwent, as most local,.products do, to Wellington. It also illustrates a familiar truth: Taranaki takes our money, and pays us back in earthquakes. Tremors along this Coast follow always/the same line. The direction is north-west to south-east; and the greatest disturbance appears to ;be a little inland of the coast-line. Accepting the theory of the earth’s crnst thickening by slow cooling,- the probability would be that in remote; ages : when , the crust was thinner; the evolving gases would have readier -vent by upheaving and breaking , .through ’ a shell of weak resistance. The, ■ .primary rocks next below the. stratified series are seen to be much disturbed, and generally the upper lines show a decreasing amount of dislocation. The upheaving, power from below must now be, greater to, produce' sufficient* vent, and the disturbances are apparently less frequent than in old time. These disturbances are likely to follow old lines of weakness as affording easier vent. It is conjectured that the earth’s crnst is a collection of wedges, for every burst through the crust would rend the earth into and a tract of country being looiSened from the wall of earth might drpp. tq a-lower level, like a thin-bottomed wedge falling lower when relieved of side pressure that held? it, up. , When ! the interior gases bxert an expansive force, they probably push ■up those earth-wedges which are broadest at bottom, while other wedges thinner at bottom will be pushed up less, and are more likely to drop first as the pressure reduces, dropping perhaps a Short distance before the pressure quite ceases, thereby filling up the space of the crack, and producing differences of upper level. Dislocations of country happen occasionally how. • In the remote era when coal forests were forming in Britain, where deep raining presents the earth’s history like a book, there seems to have been frequent dislocation by rising or falling of earth-wedges. Every “fault” in a coal bed tells that story plainly. When the miner meets a fault, he does not expect to strike his coal scam at the same level by cutting through the obstruction, but science has helped him to strike the coal again by mining to a lower level or to a higher level, according to the indications as to whether the barren wedge against which he has struck had risen or gone down: with the dislocation. That is working by a theory which practice proves to bo sound ; and the evidence presented in the coal measures assists ns to understand why earthquakes are more frequent along particular lines.