Lord Carnarvon broke the terrible monotony of agricultural meetings very
appropriately at Newbury on Tuesday, by telling his audience something of the terrible earthquake force, from which England is so free, and which so suddenly swallows up not merely the fruits of the earth in some countries, but the very land itself on which they grow. He described the three motions of the earthquake, the horizontal, which is bad, the vertical, which. is worse, and the screwing motion, which combines both, which is worst of all. The screwing or twisting motion has been known to carry the whole of one storey of a house into the place of the same storey of the next house, and property has been lifted and carried away such enormous distances that innumerable lawsuits were ne- cessary for its recovery. "A friend of mine," said Lord Carnarvon, "was overtaken on the top of one of the mountains [of the South American earthquake region] by one of these frightful earth- quakes, and as he stood and looked down upon the city where he was to find quarters for the night, he saw that very city and every human soul in it engulfed in a pit before his eyes." He told a story, too, of a Spanish gentleman whose landed property was rich and fertile and abounding in wealth and beauty one evening, and the next morning converted solely into a volcano, which had been thrown up on the site of it, and which has since borne his name, as "the only thing he could bequeath to his children." Frightfully real property indeed, as to which no right of primogeniture would be likely to be enforced ! The poor Peruvians must feel it difficult to join in the thanksgiving of the Psalmist to the God who has "made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved."
