Arizona republican., 1898-03-23
THE EARTHQUAKES HOME.

PrO1 Milne, whose lecture on earth quakes at the meeting of the British Association here last summer will be remembered, delivered an interesting lecture in London recently on "The Home of the Earthquake"
 The earthquakes home is not in Ja- pan, where popular belief places it. but Japan is one of the best places to study it in, he explained, because it is near to one of the primary causes and one of the principal centres of earth quake disturbances. That cause and that place are to be found in the ocean bed. There are two kinds of know ledge of the ocean bed, observed Prof Milne; there is that which is known to the geologists and is to be found in the text books, and there is that which is written in Old Broad Street in the an nals and records and statistics of the great cable companies and that nobody knows but the directors. When the scientific man goes poking into Old Broad street, the great cable compan- ies read him information out of the book-and in that book is more in formation about the bottom of the great ocena than in all the scientific text books ever written-but they
 
 1 for himself; he only sees the back of it, and he gropes for information as at family whist And so the geolo- gists and the text books have been able to impose a fanciful legend of the condition of things at the bottom of the great sea which has little truth in it. They imposed it even on Rudyard Kipling, who wrote of the stiffness the darkness, and the unchanging quiet in the deeps of the ocean where, sunk among the lifeless grey ooze, the cable lies, and
 Words, and the words of men, Flicker and f1utter and beat
 In reality, the bed of the ocean is a place where forever great silence and seismic changes are taking place. It is like the earth's surface, which is now swept by earthquakes, and now devasted by landslips, and now de- frosted by volcanoes, and always is ] gently changing by erosion-but with this important difference, that the floor of the ocean is much less stable than the land of the earth, and it's changes are much nor mighty Where do the earthquakes come from that shake Japan? They come from the sea to the east of them, where the sea slopes quickly down into the Pa ! cific from the coast line into the deep est soundingS known. And where dc they come from in South America ? They come, as the seismological in- struments timing them inform us from the western ocean, where the coast line dips sheer from the high mountains into the depths deeper than the height of the mountains. The home of the earthquake is here-where miles below the waters surface the steeply rolling earth is ever upon the brink of landslide perhaps we ought to call it sea slide. But these are not the only causes of earthquakes Spill sand upon a table, as a volcano spills ashes upon the earth, and the sand will pile itself in a heap which is of unstable equilibrium, and which tends to slip down. In the same way you may see that a volcano's outline is not that of a cone, but of a concave parabOlic curve curve of stability There are volcanoes in the ocean, there are sandhills piling themselves up and, like the ripple on the wave, for ever changing form; there are subter ranean springs; there are movements of currents and streams, and all these tend to disturb the unstable equilib rum of the ridges and furrows of tht ocean bed. And here, then, are tht source and the home and the causes O. the earthquake. Globe.