The Emotional and Moral Effects of Earthquakes.

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 100, 28 April 1888, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Emotional and Moral Effects of Earthquakes.

Tjik number of the ' Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan,1 which has just reached England, contains a paper by Professor Milne, the well-known investigator of earthquake phenomena, on the emotional and moral effects of earthquakes. After pointing out that the mind never grows accustomed to even tho smaller I earthquakes, but that a gradually increas- ; ing terror is doveloped, he discusses the permanent effects on a nation of the larger and more disastrous convulsions. The survivors of the Manila earthquake of July, 1880, said of themselves that they had lost their nerves. ' We have lived ten years in a minute '; and the general cflect of such earthquakes as that of Caracas in 1812 when ' from the first tolling- of a bell to the fulling of the last stone of the city of Caracas one minute only elapsed,' Ohio in 1881, aid many others, is that ' whole communities suddenly suffer a mental paralysis, which in many cases amounts to madness.' and ' for years after such a catastrophe every tremble in the earth will produce a panic. The experience and fears of fathers are handed down to their children, and before these terrors have become things of tho past a fresh disaster adds fuel to the fire, consuming the moral constitution.' In former times earthquakes were, and in certain countries are now, regarded tin divine judgments for tho sins of men. In 1603 the Kirk Session of Aberdeen accepted a .shock as "a document that God is angry against this land, and against this city in particular." On further consideration it was decided that the special sin of the people of Aberdeen was salmon-fishing on , Sunday, and a certain learned Fellow or the Ro3'al Society argued in the "Philosophical Transactions" that earthquakes must be divine judgments on men, seeing that they visit great cities and not bare cliffs and uninhabited benches. In London, in 1756, ! during tho earthquake, the populace seized a young Englishmen and baptized him against his will to appease the wrath of an offended deity. A theory of earthquakes published by a poet in 1750 in connection with the Palermo shock was that Tho tread of Impiuu feet The conscious earth impatient bears: And, shuddering with tho guilty weight, One common grave for her bad race prepares. Professor Milne concludes that the effect of seismic phenomena on the human race has been very great. In some eases they have produced madness and death, they have distorted the powers of reason and have begotten superstition, the imagination has been stimulated, and ' among the weaker members of the community, by the creation of feelings of timidity, resulting pehaps in mental aberrations like madness or imbecility, the seeds have been sown for a process of selection, by which the weaker members in the ordinary course of racial competition must succumb.' The survivors living in insecurity, perhaps grow reckless and careless, and thus the whole life of a nation may be affected. The successful nations of to-day are not those which have had to fight against these unintelligible terrors of nature.