lling walls, 177 by fire,
7 shot, and 2 deaths by ptomaine poisoning--452 in all. The property
damage by the earthquake is scarcely worth speaking of, being no more
than happens elsewhere in the world from other causes nearly every day;
it would have been quickly made good and little thought of it but for
the conflagration that followed.

Compare San Francisco casualties with those of other cities. Two hundred
and sixty-six deaths as the result of the greatest calamity that ever
happened in California! Not to mention the floods, fires, and cyclones
common to St. Louis, Chicago, Galveston, and all mid-continent America,
the yellow fever at New Orleans and along the southern shore, or the
25,000 deaths from cholera in New York and Philadelphia in less than
twenty-five years, or the loss of 1,000 ships on the Atlantic coast
in the hurricane of August, 1873-not to mention the many extraordinary
displays of vindictive nature, take some of the more commonplace
calamities incident to most cities except those along the Pacific coast.

Every year more people and more property are destroyed by lightning,
floods, and wind-storms on the Atlantic side of the Rocky mountains
than are affected by earthquakes on the Pacific side in a hundred years.
Every year more people drop dead from sunstrokes in New York, Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and other eastern cities than are killed by earthquakes
in San Francisco in a thousand years, so far as we may know. Yet men and
women continue to live and build houses in those cities without thought
of running away.

Nor can California claim the whole even of United States earthquakes. In
1755 all New England was shaken up, and Boston housetops and walls were
set dancing, the horror coming in "with a roaring noise, like that of
thunder," as the record has it, "and then a swell like the roaring sea";
and yet, and notwithstanding the great fire later, the city still shows
vitality, the people are not afraid, and property is valuable. And so in
regard to New York and London and all cities. In Missouri, in 1811, the
earth shook almost continuously for several months along a stretch of
three hundred miles, throwing up prairies into sand hills and submerging
forests. Chicago and New York, and all the country between, were visited
by earthquakes in 1870. Then there are Virginia and the Carolinas,
Alabama Texas and Colorado--there is not a state in the union that has
not had a touch of well-authenticated earth