our readers if we
pass over these ruinous disasters and confine ourselves to the less
destructive earthquakes which have taken place within our own country.

The United States, large a section of North America as it occupies, is
fortunate in being in a great measure destitute of volcanic phenomena,
while destructive earthquakes have been very rare in its history. This,
it is true, does not apply to the United States as it is, but as it was.
It has annexed the volcano and the earthquake with its new accessions of
territory. Alaska has its volcanoes, the Philippines are subject to
both forms of convulsion, and in Hawaii we possess the most spectacular
volcano of the earth, while the earthquake is its common attendant.
But in the older United States the volcano contents itself with an
occasional puff of smoke, and eruptive phenomena are confined to the
minor form of the geyser.

We are by no means so free from the earthquake. Slight movements of the
earth's surface are much more common than many of us imagine, and in
the history of our land there have been a number of earth shocks
of considerable violence. Prior to that of San Francisco, the most
destructive to life and property was that of Charleston in 1886, though
the 1812 convulsion in the Mississippi Valley might have proved a
much greater calamity but for the fact that civilized man had not then
largely invaded its centre of action.

As regards the number of earth movements in this country, we are told
that in New England alone 231 were recorded in two hundred and fifty
years, while doubtless many slighter ones were left unrecorded. Taking
the whole United States, there were 364 recorded in the twelve years
from 1872 to 1883, and in 1885 fifty-nine were recorded, more than
two-thirds of them being on the Pacific slope. Most of these, however,
were very slight, some of them barely perceptible.

Confining ourselves to those of the past important in their effects, we
shall first speak of the shocks which took place in New England in 1755,
in the year and month of the great earthquake at Lisbon. On the 18th of
November of that year, while the shocks at Lisbon still continued,
New England was violently shaken, loud underground explosive noises
accompanying the shocks. In the harbors along the Atlantic coast there
was much agitation of the waters and many dead fish were thrown up on
the shores. The shock, indeed, was felt far from the coast, by the
crew of a ship more