Earthquakes and fires do their greatest damage in the cities. There was a lesson in the confusion of tongues at Babel which the world would have done well, and would yet do well, to heed. Untold suffering by fire and contagious disease as well as by earthquake and storm, would have been avoided, and might yet be avoided, if men would not defy the elements and the plagues by huddling together to prey off one another instead of leading the more independent rural lives designed by the Creator. The so-called "enterprise" of man, the "wisdom" that is "foolishness with God," is illustrated in the great cities where thousands of people exist in a block of buildings. Many of these have little idea of the probability of the next meal, yet they could hardly be induced to leave the congested conditions. Through such conditions—the result of human "business" acumen—three per cent. of New York's population own all the houses, where the people are huddled together like rats, while there are yet seventeen hundred million acres of unoccupied land in the United States.
The Siesmographic Record of the earthquake of April 19, 1892, at 2:49.2 A.M. Its duration was long, fifty-eight seconds. This record and also the others, we presume, as they are all from the same observatory, are on a scale of one to seven; that is, these records are seven times larger than the originals; or to put it another way, the pen of the seismograph moved over seven times more space than the earth did.
