14 DECEMBER 1889, Page 23

on the story of these terrible convulsions from early times—there

is no very early record of an earthquake—down to that great catastrophe which destroyed the White and Pink Terraces of New

Zealand. Here, however, he contents himself with quoting a description of them, as they were, by Mr. Froude, the last English traveller who visited them. It is a formidable catalogue of disasters that is here given, the destruction of Lisbon ranking, perhaps, as the first in point of horror,—not so much on account of the number of the victims, as of its nearness to the centres of thought. Sixty thousand perished at Lisbon, and double that number forty years afterwards at Riobamba. (What, by-the-way, does the translator mean by " the upper districts of the Equator " ?) But mankind was much more affected by the less fatal event of the two. This is an interesting book, showing a respectable amount of research, but we should not have had such a blunder as to attribute the geographer Pausanias to "the close of the second century before Christ."