long the southern Atlantic
coast in the vicinity of Charleston, another is in Missouri, and the
third includes the Pacific Coast from a point north of San Francisco
down to and beyond San Diego."

In describing the instruments at the weather bureau which make the
record of earthquakes, even when the movement is so small that the
ordinary person does not recognize it, Prof. Moore said:

"The apparatus we have is a pen drawing a continuous line on a
cylinder which revolves once every hour and is worked continuously by
clockwork in an exact record of time. It moves in a straight line when
there is no disturbance, and it jumps from right to left and back
again when there are serious oscillations of the earth. The extent of
these movements of the pen measures the grade of the oscillation. You
may think it is a fantastic statement, but this seismographic pen is
adjusted so delicately that it will register your step in its
vicinity.

"The instrument is mounted on a solid stone foundation and what it
registers is the effect of your weight pressing upon the earth. It is
easy to see, therefore, that the record we have obtained of this
earthquake shows a few preliminary tremblings, which seem to be
premonitions, for about four minutes, then a great crash which threw
the pen off the cylinder and finally a period of nearly four hours,
during which there were slight tremblings of the earth, this latter
period marking the readjustment after the actual shock."

Most of the scientists were inclined to believe that the boiling
process in the interior of the earth, although it goes on
continuously, is subject to periods of greater or less activity. This
activity may be, however, purely local, according to the scientific
theory, for otherwise there would be eruptions in all the active
volcanoes of the earth at the same time, and there would be
earthquakes in every one of the areas where there is liability to
seismic disturbances.

One government scientist in discussing the San Francisco earthquake
said: "If we could have been right here in the vicinity of Washington
a few hundreds of thousands of millions of years ago, we should have
seen earthquakes that were earthquakes. The Alleghanies were broken up
by great convulsions of the earth, and it is probable that this North
American continent of ours was rocked a foot or two at a time, causing
a tremendous crash of matter and the reorganization of the world
itself.

"The crust, whil