The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-06-04
A THRILLING THEORY.

The ST. Louis Republic has an extraor-
binary genius who, in dealing with ter
restrial phenomena, puts to blush Flam-
marion, the brilliant romancer of astron-
omy. The Republics inspired scientist
declares that the decadence of the Califor-
MIA earthquake and the advent of the
cyclone that devastates the Western and
Northwestern States is explainable on this
ground: Earthquakes have an electrical
origin, and the connecting lines of iron
rails which constitute the overland rail-
roads have transferred this electrical energy
from California to the region east of the
Rockies, and there it is employing itself in
the form of the electrical storms known as
cyclones.
Nothing more brilliant than this has
been conceived since the time when Ches-
ter Hull, a San Francisco journalist, per
petrated his celebrated earthquake hoax"
on New York paper. Hull made that pa.
per believe and announce that an infallible
preventive of earthquakes had been found
in planting rows of eucalyptus trees per-
pendicular to the coast line and stretching
twenty miles apart from the coast to the
axis of the Sierra. His full statement
of the case was one of the most
overwhelmingly scientific treatises ever
penned. Hull was also the inspiration OF
the Cardiff Giant hoax, with which the
public is more familiar.
But the genius of the Republic is not in
dulging in hoaxes. He appears to be honest
in thinking that earthquakes and cyclones
have an electrical origin; that by some
mysterious means electricity changes its
fu, oti Inv fro he
ground at one place and the air at another,
and that cyclones did not occur at time
when there was no population to observe
and record them.
1t is true that earthquakes seem prac-
tically to have abandoned California, but
cannot the genius of the Republic permit
his wide-winged imagination a further and
more grandly soaring flight than so COM
mon-place an analysis of the transmission
and transformation of Electrical energy Fol-
that seems inadequate to the loftiness OF
his aspiration. He might have made use
OF theory advanced by very large and
intelligent part OF the people, to the effect
that thought is a dynamic force and that
il acts as energy at distance remote from
its source. He might have expanded the
ordinary application of the theory and
shown that one of the following reasons
for the phenomena which he has observed
might be the right one: First, that earth
quakes have practically ceased because we
willed that they should cease; second, that
the mental condition of repose and peace
which Californians enjoy as the result of a
pleasant environment has acted upon the
forces which produced subterranean turbu.
lence, and, on the principle Of
Pythagoras' theory of the music
of the spheres" subdued them
and transformed them potentially into
beneficent agencies; third, that, con-
versely, the cyclones of the Mississippi
basin are transformed expression of the
| dissatisfaction, unhappiness and inward
turbulence of the people of that region.
The Imagination stands appalled, in the
presence of the speculations which the
genius of the Republic has suggested. But
| it is we'll that such writer's exist. Even
though they lift US but for moment above
the hardness and meanness with which we
| fill our lives, in that one moment we lay a
hand upon the fieeting rainbow and hear
the laughter of the sunshine. The clown
would be less amusing did he not paint his
face, and we have gained something if we
can prevent the length of donkey's ears
| from making us ignore the genuine sad.
| ness which lends a melancholy tone to his