EARTHQUAKES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVIII, Issue 81918, 27 February 1907, Page 4

EARTHQUAKES.

The y.brutions of uu earthquake Mr ' tiansmitted along the external crust oour planet at a speed which the min i can scarcely conceive. Writin" in Knowledge on the shock of the° .San Franc sco earthquake, 11. (.'amille l'lammarion says:—"lt was registered by all the seismometers of 'the globe, and it was not till I hey had twin: mad" the tour of the world that the tremor* decreased in force. I have before me the diagrams of the oscillations in Kngland (Birmingham), Belgium (the ltoyal Ob.-ervatory of Ueeiej, Au.tria (Ijialiach, etc-, and they show tin course of the wave. ft passed -Birmingham at twenty-live m.nutes pas', one, by tlreenwich time. As the time of thirteen minutes pa .-I live at San Francisco corresponds to that of thirteen Minutes past one at Birmingham, we see that it only took 12 minutes to go from Nili Iranciseo to Birmingham. H arrived at the same time at Brussels (Uecle), and a lit tie later in Austria. The time o£ Central Europe is in advance ef Greenwich time. * M) Davison's s tudy of the oscillations of Birmingham showed that a second registration followed the first i n 3h. Kim., after having made the tour of the whole world," Incidentally. Hi. Klammarion shatters the fallacy" that earthquakes are the consequence of volcanic eruptions. He points to Japan in proof of the popular error: ''Everybody knows that Japan is par excellence the land for earthquakes, as it has as many as four a day. But the most unstable regions are not by any means those contiguous to Fusiama, the great Japanese volcanic mountain, which, moreover, lias been quiet for the last 300 years. No eruptive manifestation accompanied tlx- great se's mic disturbances of 18!)1 and 1807. but many earthquakes have, taken place in regions not at all volcanic. At Kail Francisco, for example, there is no volcano; and there have been earthquakes in many other spots where the volcano is absent or where, if it exists, it. has shown no activity. Sei,,mis disturbances are not caused by volcanic eruptions, either near or distant. But the seismic disturbances and volcanic eruptions are both due to the pliant state of some region of the earth's crust."