The 18 September 1692 Earthquake in the Belgian Ardenne and Its Aftershocks - Historical Seismology: Interdisciplinary Studies of Past and Recent Earthquakes - page 201

Fig. 1 Seismic activity in northwest Europe (1350-2006)
and a later copy is not clearly specified. This lack of the rules of historical criticism
was the cause of many mistakes (Alexandre 1990).
In two of the famous catalogues of Alexis Perrey (1845, 1847), the shock of
18 September 1692 appears as a phenomenon located in the eastern part of the
Belgian province of Brabant, in the area between Brussels and Antwerp (Fig. 2).
According to Perrey, the perceptibility area included Paris, Normandy, the coasts
of England, the Netherlands, Frankfurt/a.M. and towards the southeast the Swiss
cantons of Vaud and Valais. This mention of Switzerland comes from the work of
Gueneau de Montbeliard (1761), an author who does not quote his sources, and
has not been confirmed by contemporaneous texts. In fact, up to now, there is no
original text known confirming such a distant extension of the 1692 earthquake in
this direction. This example illustrates the methods of Perrey and other compilers:
they mention their sources, but some of them are unverifiable by the reader. Similar
examples are the catalogues of Von Hoff (1840) and Mallet (1852), which give the
same description of the earthquake under discussion, nearly from the same sources.
The Belgian catalogue of Lancaster (1901) does not bring any new data and also
locates the epicentre of the shock in the Belgian province of Brabant. The catalogue
of Lemoine (1911) gives an epicentre near Mechelen (Fig. 2), without explanation.
Davison (1924), in his English catalogue, files the 1692 event among the “earth-
quakes of unknown epicentres in England”.
In their regional works, Villette (1904-05) and Van Rummelen (1943) supply
some new data from original sources for the Champagne and the Dutch Limburg.