A Study of Recent Earthquakes

Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see the end of this document . Some unicode characters may not show in all browsers, hover your mouse over the missing character to see the meaning. Like this. Click on the images to see a larger version. A STUDY OF RECENT EARTHQUAKES. BY CHARLES DAVISON, Sc.D., F.G.S. AUTHOR OF "THE HEREFORD EARTHQUAKE OF DECEMBER 17TH, 1896." WITH 80 ILLUSTRATIONS London and Newcastle-on-Tyne: THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD. 1905 PREFACE. The present volume differs from a text-book of seismology in giving brief, though detailed, accounts of individual earthquakes rather than a discussion of the phenomena and distribution of earthquakes in general. At the close of his Les Tremblements de Terre , Professor Fouqué has devoted a few chapters to some of the principal earthquakes between 1854 and 1887; and there are also the well-known chapters in Lyell's Principles of Geology dealing with earthquakes of a still earlier date. With these exceptions, there is no other work covering the same ground; and he who wishes to study any particular earthquake can only do so by reading long reports or series of papers written perhaps in several different languages. The object of this volume is to save him this trouble, and to present to him the facts that seem most worthy of his attention. The chapter on the Japanese earthquake is reprinted, with a few slight additions, from a paper published in the Geographical Journal , and I am indebted to the editor, not only for the necessary permission, but also for his courtesy in furnishing me with clichés of the blocks which illustrated the original paper. The editor of Knowledge has also allowed me to use a paper which appeared four years ago as the foundation of the ninth chapter in this book. CHARLES DAVISON. Birmingham, January, 1905. CONTENTS. PAGE Introduction 1 The Neapolitan Earthquake of December 16th, 1857 7 The Ischian Earthquakes of March 4th, 1881, and July 28th, 1883 45 The Andalusian Earthquake of December 25th, 1884 75 The Charleston Earthquake of August 31st, 1886 102 The Riviera Earthquake of February 23rd, 1887 138 The Japanese Earthquake of October 28th, 1891 177 The Hereford Earthquake of December 17th, 1896, and the Inverness Earthquake of September 18th, 1901 215 The Indian Earthquake of June 12th, 1897 262 Conclusion 321…