Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
chemical effects, illustrated in what we call photography, is new; and what
little is known about the interior of the earth has been learnt since New-
ton lived.”
37
Dickens dreamed that Victorian science might ascend from the
study of earthquakes to an all-encompassing cosmology.
other Englishmen read more worldly lessons into the earthquake of
1863. the
Times
observed that “there are means, utterly beyond our ken
and our computation, far below our feet, by which cities may be subverted,
populations suddenly cut off, and empires ruined.” Reflecting on the fate
of the ottomans, the editor noted, “we see, afar off, a great Empire, that
had threatened to predominate over all mankind, suddenly broken up by
moral agencies and shattered into no one knows how many fragments. we
are safe from that fate, at least so we deem ourselves, for never were we so
united. But there are other weapons of destruction in the arsenal of the
OMNIPOTENT. who can say what strange trial of shaking, or upheaving,
sinking, dividing, or drying-up, may await us? we know by science these
isles have gone through many a strange metamorphosis, and science can-
not assure us that there are none more to come.”
38
It was a remarkably
quick leap from recognizing that England was not immune to earthquakes
to sensing the fragility of the British Empire.
Nonetheless, after 1863 earthquakes once again vanished from the pages
of British newspapers and the worries of the public. Until, that is, the morn-
ing of 22 April 1884, when the town of Colchester in Essex—never before
the site of seismic activity—was hit by the most destructive earthquake ever
recorded in Britain. the damage was significant enough, if geographically
limited, that a national collection was undertaken. on the other hand, there
were no fatalities, apart from one woman who was so disturbed by the event
that she drowned herself.
39
As usual, the papers had to remind the Brit-
ish public that “such disturbances were by no means unknown in former
times.”
40
In the view of the seismologist Charles Davison, the 1884 quake
was “the chief means of converting it [the present generation] from the be-
lief in the absence or comparative harmlessness of British earthquakes.”
41
there was one crucial difference between 1863 and 1884, and that was
the state of seismological science. In the intervening years, John Milne and
Patrick Ewing had introduced seismometry in Japan and had begun to
establish earthquakes as a proper object of quantitative physical science.
Milne promoted his own work in the London
Times
in 1881, and that
paper followed two years later with an article entitled “the Vigour of the
Earth.” It stressed the sophistication of Milne's new instruments: “A delicate
seismometer is agitated when to human sensation not the smallest sign
