Letters from Japan up to November 10th have been received,
giving frightful accounts of one of the most violent and longest.
enduring earthquakes of which we have any record. It had already lasted for twelve days, and during the last twenty hours of. those twelve days, no less than 750 shooks had been experienced ; so that there was no sign then of the cessation of the explosive force which was desolating the whole neighbour- hood of Gifu, over a space certainly larger than Hertfordshire, and probably as large as Sussex. Close to Gifu itself a mountain seems to have disappeared into great cavities in the earth, where it has dammed up the course of a river, and already produced a lake 50 ft. in depth. At least eight thousand people appear to have been killed, a much larger number suffering serious injury, while over four hundred thousand have been rendered homeless by the destruction of their houses, a result which, of course, a multitude of fires, caused by the breaking of lamps and the scattering of lighted fuel, greatly accelerated. Holes in the earth have opened everywhere, some of them as much as 6 ft. wide and 20 ft. deep. The violence of the shaking was all on the surface, which was shaken not only from side to side, but also in a vertical direction,—against which last vibration, of course, the buildings built with pendulums to ensure them against the effects of horizontal vibration, were in no way secured. At the bottom of a cutting, the lines of railway were left undisturbed ; but where the railway van along the surface, its rails were in many places twisted into the most complicated knots.
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