p. 101 | The Earth in Trouble

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 14, 1871

The Earth in Trouble.

TWENTY-FIVE DISASTROUS EARTHQUAKES IN 1869 AND 1870.

A CORRESPONDENT sends us a long article clipped from the Boston Journal, giving a remarkable list of earthquakes which have occurred within the past two years, from which we take the following extracts:—

Philosophers divide earthquakes into three classes, viz.: (1) The disastrous and destructive, comprehending all those capable of overturning buildings, destroying ships, and convulsing the earth; (2) The severe, those capable of forming rents in houses and fissures in the ground, and (3) the harmless, which cause a shock, but are too feeble to destroy life or buildings, or rend the ground. Of the one hundred and forty-nine earthquakes experienced in New England between the years 1638 and 1850 inclusive, nearly all were of this last-named class, this kind being by far the most numerous. A writer in one of our popular monthlies supposes that thirty thousand shocks of earthquake, comprising all classes and all degrees of severity, have been felt over the whole earth during the past hundred years, which, if true, would realize the conception of Humboldt, who imagined some part of the earth to be perpetually trembling under these remarkable visitations. The writer of this has himself enumerated over four thousand shocks which occurred in the two years 1867, 1868.

Of great and terrible destructive earthquakes, only one each year is registered by Mallet, Ponton, and other historians of these phenomena, as happening between the years 1800 and 1865. In 1867–68 the number of this first class of earthquakes increased alarmingly, no less than eleven occuring in the following places and countries, and in the order here named, viz.: Algiers, in Northern Africa, the island of Mitylene, St. Thomas, in the West Indies, the island of Formosa, the Sandwich Islands, Northern Ecuador, Peru, Chili, Ecuador, California, and Jalisco, in Mexico, while others of a frightful character have taken place under the floor of the ocean; this number of the kind destructive of cities, villages, and human life, by which over one hundred thousand human beings were estimated to have perished, being far in advance of any previous two years in this century. So remarkably was the earth convulsed during this period as that it attracted the universal attention of scientific men, and occasioned no small amount of conjecture, as well as some degree of alarm, though no generally accepted and satisfactory solution of this extraordinary unrest of the earth has yet appeared.

Then follows a list of earthquakes, after which the article concludes as follows:—

On reviewing the foregoing list, we find here registered some twenty-five disastrous earthquakes, all occurring within the two years ending December 31, 1870, and the list may be, and probably is, yet incomplete, owing to our imperfect information of what is transpiring in distant countries. These terrible convulsions, though not on so grand a scale as those of the two preceding years, 1867 and 1868, are so terribly destructive of human life, are nevertheless most extraordinary as respects their number and severity, and overwhelmingly demonstrate the truthfulness of the views of those savants who hold that the earthquake forces are by no means becoming more and more quiet and dying out, but on the contrary, from some unknown cause, are increasing in activity. At any rate, there is enough in the earthquake record of the past four years to justify the remark of the scientific writer in a late number of Blackwood's Magazine, who says: "We have been passing through a remarkable period of terrestrial phenomena—more remarkable, certainly, than any which has been witnessed by the present generation." And we may add, it is by no means certain that we have reached the end of the earthquake term.

And here we may also be permitted to state that in the absence of any and all established theories of the earth's internal structure, by which to account for the terrible convulsions of which we are writing, there is increasing evidence for regarding very favorably the generally accepted belief of the earth's interior being a molten, fiery mass, considered as the only one that fairly accounts for all the varied and well-known phenomena of earthquakes felt and witnessed on the surface crust. In harmony with this opinion, there is plausibility in the conclusion of Prof. T. M. Thorpe, who imagines the great shocks of 1867–8 to have been caused by the breaking off of immense masses of solid earth from the inner crust, which, falling into the lava caldron below, agitated it into gigantic, throbbing and rolling waves, that heaved the outer crust with great throbs and throes. Indeed, the theory of this scientist, who has made seismic action a special study, together with his wide-spread and sagacious conjectures of a series of great earthquakes the whole world over, made on the occurrence of the destructive shock at St. Thomas, in October, 1867, and subsequently published in all the papers, was amply supported and borne out to a sad reality in the experience of the three or four years that have followed the utterance of his prediction, during which time the earth, the emblem of all that is stable, has agonized in deep and mysterious troubles for which the Lord of nature affords at present no remedy. Assuredly, this generation of men are the witnesses of events of the most startling character and marvelous significance. Oh! for a prophet's glance to read the future aright!