EARTHQUAKE IN ENGLAND.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Volume II, Issue 70, 30 December 1863, Page 1 (Supplement)

EARTHQUAKE IN ENGLAND.

Somewhere between twenty minutes and half an hour after 3 o'clock on the morning of the 6th October, 1863, the sounds and vibrations of an earthquake were felt by tens of thousands of persons in almost all parts of England, from the suburbs of the metropolis to the extremities of the kingdom. Such visitations are, happily, so rare in this country that it is not surprising that most persons who were suddenly awakened on this occasion by the violent shaking of their beds, and rattling of their windows, should at first have been at a loss to understand what had happened, and should have retained different impressions of its character. The whole experience of the motion does not appear generally to have lasted more than a few seconds, which did not afford sufficient time to allow people scared out of their sleep to collect their faculties, and make observations. Before they could have fairly rubbed their eyes and determined the nature of their sensations, all was quiet again. Yet there is a common agreement as to the main fact, and the variations as to particular circumstances are so trivial as to be of no importance whatever. In some places the shock was more violent than in others, and lasted a little longer. But the duration must be assumed from the average testimony rather than from individual evidence; for at such a time different temperaments would be differently affected, and the nervous system is not the most accurate register of time. It may be concluded that the whole event occupied less than a minute, although in one locality it is said to have occupied two minutes. In the 14 black country," and throughout the Midland and West Midland counties, the earthquake appears to have been felt the most. At Birmingham walls were seen to move, and people rose from their beds to see what damage had been done, for though the rumbling, grating sound is compared to that of a passing wagon or train, it was known at once to be something more. At Edgbaston, successive shocks were plainly felt, houses were shaken to their foundations, " a dreadful rattle" was rather felt than heard, and people woke one another to ask the meaning. Evervthing around was violently agitated. At Wolverhampton everything in the houses vibrated to the external agitation. The houses cracked and groaned as if the timbers had been strained. The policemen on duty saw the walls vibrate, heard everything rattle about them, and Tere witnesses to the universal terror of the roused sleepers. From near Stourbridge we are told that a house quivered from top to bottom, the silver rattled, the furniture shivered, and it seemed as if there had been an explosion under the cellars. 44 Its duration," says a correspondent from Hereford, 44 as far as I could judge, was about eight seconds; some persons say more. The effect was that of a very heavy and long train rushing furiously through a station, but the jar or shock experienced was greater than any I ever felt produced bv a train. The bed on which I lay was violently shaken, and the iron bars of the shutters of the room (the shutters being closed but not barred) rattled loudly against the shutters; and I found that it required a considerable amount of shaking with the hand to effect this. The sound at first increased rapidly with a gradual crescendo for two or three seconds, uutil the crash was felt (which lasted for about one second and a half, and consisted of two concussions) and then subsided as gradually for some seconds more, until it died away in the distance. It appeared to me to equal the loudest peal of thunder I ever heard, but it was fuller, and deeper, and grander than thunder. In about three minutes afterwards a second faint rumble was heard." In South Staffordshire and East Worcestershire doors were burst open, crockery and furniture broken, clocks stopped, and whole populations brought out of their beds. At Cheltenham, a great distance from that neighborhood, a deep rumbling noise was heard, the heaviest furniture was shaken, the fire-irons rattled, heavy stone-walls were heard to strain and crack, aud the boys at the College were each under the impression that the rest were engaged in making the greatest possible disturbance. The earthquake appears to have extended with equal force to

Bristol, to Taunton, to Exeter, to Swansea, and many miles out at sea. In the where we all repose on a deep bed of clay, where our houses are well built, and where we are so accustomed to noises, shocks, and tremors that we are almost startled to find it calm and quiet, a large proportion of us felt a sort of shock and shiver, and the feeling of being upheaved, followed by a sense of oppression ; but very few of us could trust our own sensations, and be sure it was something out of the usual course. Charles Dickens describes the sensation at Higham-by-Rochester as being " exactly as if some great beast had been crouching asleep under the bedstead and were now shaking itself and trying to rise." The variety of sensations and the degrees of violence, if there should appear to have been a difference in different localities, may possibly be owing to the variations of geological condition rather than to the distance from any supposed centre. Those who had experienced a similar phenomenon, either in Italy, the West Indies, or South America, declare that the shock was as severe as any one they had ever felt. One gentleman, who had witnessed personally the fearful results of an upheaving of the ground of a town in South America, alleges that the same sickness of the whole body came over him as on that occasion, awaking apprehensions of quick calamities.