The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 1909. THE ITALIAN EARTHQUAKES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1, 7 January 1909, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 1909. THE ITALIAN EARTHQUAKES

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HERE is an element of good in physical evil — even (as seismologists assure us) in .the wreck and havoc that earthquakes leave in their crumpled track. ' There is much,' says one authority, 'to deplore in earthquakes and eruptions, but these disturbances show that jthere is sufficient vital force left in our planet to support human life for thousands of years — say, at least ,till the next glacial epoch, which is due in about twenty thousand years. 3 All this is, no«doubt, very true. But it will take more than this sort of proverb to patch the grief of those who, as survivors or as active sympathisers, have witnessed the ruin and disaster that have fallen upon large urban and rxiral regions of Sicily and Calabria. For long ages the earth's springy and responsive shell has been cooling and creeping and shrinking and dipping and side-slipping on both sides of the Straits of Messina-. The ' quaky ' area was extensive, fertile, packed with towns and villages, and densely populated. The disaster that struck it so suddenly with crumbling earth and tidal wave has turned that beautiful and smiling region — including a part of ' the garden of Italy ' — into a tangled heap of ruins, beneath which .lie buried the piled-up remains of dead, whose numbers have been estimated at from 100,000 to 200,000 and more. • The panic of this great catastrophe may well excuse over-estimates of the toll of lives taken by wave and seismic shock.' But even the most conservative accounts leave the Sicilian-Calabrian earthquake of the closing days of 1908 one of the direst calamities of the kind of which history bears -a record. The long-drawn siege of Paris left the ' gay capital ' with, two hundred acres of ruins. A few strenuous seconds of earthquake and tidal wave wrought more ruin, and piled up a higher holocaust of slain, than many a big war. The earth-wave set up by the shock outside Messina shook and tore and crumpled towns far inland in Calabria and left a photographic record of its movements upon' seismographs as far afield- as i;he Commonwealth of Australia. . - ' ■ • \ In the presence of this crowning calamity that makes all the world akin,' one feels how puny is the cheap sarcasm which La Rochefoucauld flings at the lack of sympathy of our kind. Almost as swiftly as the earth-wave rode and the electric wire flashed the brief but terrible story, there swept back a swelling tide of practical help . and sympathy from the ends of the earth to the afflicted - people in the desolated regions of Sicily and Calabria. Such noble charity does honor to our race. And steam and the electric wire, and the " medical art, and «very varied form of organised Christian charity, and every section in Chamber and State, joined hands in minimising the" effects of a calamity that in 1 less happy days would have reached far greater proportions. Bay-crowns and heaven's jewels to the brave hearts of many nations and faiths who toiled so nobly, and amid such perils 1 And rest eternal to the souls of those -who have gone to their account amidst such swift and overwhelming devastation!

The Sicilian-Calabrian earthquakes of 1908 take their place upon the great historical catastrophes of this kind. Except for those of the past fifty years, the figures of the

dead must be taken as, at least, approximations. But, even as approximations, many of these calamities enter into serious competition with war as destroyers of property and life. Referring to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, we told how Mulhall's table of the most destrucr tive~ earthquakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in his Dictionary of Statistics) opens with a record (estimate) of 190,000 deaths at Yeddo (Japan) in 1793, and closes with the 2000 victims of the great ' shake ' at Ischia (in the Bay of Naples) in 1883. But the great statistician's list (as we then pointed out) is curiously incomplete. No mention, for instance, is made of the 12,000 souls wlto were, dissolved from their partnership" with 12,000 bodies when Caracas was pounded to bits on March 12, 1812; nor of the (estimated) 10,000 victims of the Manila ' quakes ' of July, 1863 ; nor of the 25,000 lives (more or less) that were destroyed on August 13-15, 1868, when five cities and a number of towns and villages in Ecuador and Peru were pulled to pieces by earth-waves and tidal waves that wrought like regiments of demon Sampsons. Neither is there any record iii the Dictionary of Statistics regarding the great convulsion of Krakatoa (1883), with its estimated death-roll of 36,500 ,nor of that of Nippon Island (1891), with its round number tale of 10,000 dead. In reading of the destruction wrought by seismic forces, it is some comfort to learn, on the authority of the astronomer Herschel, that earthquakes are unavoidable and (in a sense) ' necessary incidents in a vast system of action to which we owe the • ground we stand upon — the very land we inhabit, without which neither man, beast, nor bird would liave a place for their existence, and the world would be a habitation of nothing but fishes.' The world is fitted by Providence for human habitation not alone by the slow action by which the glacier grinds down the valleys and the drip-di'ip of rain and the fanning of wind and the nipping of frost rounds the hills, but likewise by the sudden shock of seismic forces that lift the ocean beds and crack the backbones of the hills. Puny man is powerless when caught in the clash of these vast forces when at play. And, though difficult in many instances to act upon, the only method of avoiding, as far as may be, such destruction of human life as was witnessed in Sicily and Calabria, seems to be to accept the advice of those scientists who have "urged upon the Italian Government the prevention of town and city building within the regions that have so long been scourged by earthquakes.