THE FEAR OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES.
WE wonder if any person in the world has been frightened by the appearance and disappearance of the new star in Perseus of which astronomers have recently made so much. Somebody ought to have been. The new light probably appeared because a sun had exploded, or because two suns had collided, evolving temporarily an almost inconceivable quantity of flame. If a distant sun could explode, so could our sun; and if two suns could collide, some sun of which we know nothing may be rushing at a pace which the mind does not grasp, though the brain can calculate it, towards our own. There should be something alarming to the imaginative in that idea, but, so far as we know, nobody has been alarmed. The catastrophe in Perseus, whatever its cause, must have occurred fifty years ago to give the light time to get here, and catastrophes so inconceivably distant are outside the range even of the imagination. We read of them as we read of quintillions, grasping the words, but not the thoughts they are intended to convey. The mass of mankind, too, are protected against astronomical alarms, not only by their ignorance, but by two very steady beliefs. One, which is not quite reasonable, is that God, though be allows railway collisions, will never allow anything so big as an astronomical catastrophe—as if there could be greatness or littleness in the eyes of the Infinite—and the other, which is reasonable enough, is that if an astronomical catastrophe affected sentient beings at all, it must destroy all of them within its range utterly and at once. That would only be death, which we must all suffer, and death under unusual circumstances of consolation, death so rapid and so universal that we should part from no one and leave no one behind to suffer. There is much more to alarm in the little catastrophe which has possibly occurred within the last few days. An unaccountable wave has traversed ocean, nearly destroying the ' Teutonic ' for one thing, and showers of coloured dust have obscured the sky from Sicily to the Carpathians, or possibly beyond them. The same phenomena on a greater scale followed the volcanic explosion of 1883 in Krakatoa, and it is reasonable, therefore, to believe that either in the ocean, or more probably in the centre of Africa, there has, been a grand volcanic eruption. Superheated steam generated by some outburst of water into the internal fires has caused an explosion lifting millions of tons of earth and pulverised rock into the air, which floats away at a high elevation in the form of dust. There is nothing to alarm in that by itself, for the event has come and gone, but that dust may conceivably be poisoned. The gases which are thrown out by such explosions are not healthy ; and it is possible—Mr. R. A. Proctor, the astronomer, in his book on •• Other Worlds" (p. 14), evidently believes it certain—that with the dust much animal matter is also thrown into the air. He says ;—" Even in the very bowels of the earth, and in the
very neighbourhood of active volcanoes, we find the volcano- fish existing in such countless thousands that when they are from time to time vomited forth by the erupting mountain their bodies are strewn over enormous regions, and as they putrefy beneath the sun's rays, spread pestilence and disease among the inhabitants of the neighbouring districts." Clearly, if that is true, part of the dust which flies so far must be, or at least may be, composed of animal particles which, putrefy- ing, spread disease. At all events, there is much reason to believe that effects very inimical either to life or health do follow volcanic explosions, and that Southern Europe may, therefore, be visited shortly by some form of epidemic or some pest like the kind of influenza which seemed, at all events, to begin its ravages after Krakatoa was shattered. That is not pleasant to think of, and if the Southerners anticipate it, which is probable enough, their rush to the churches does not strike us as quite so imbecilely superstitious as it strikes the makers of bulletins. Popu- lations are composed of individuals, and prayer can never to the individual mind seem more attractive than when it is resorted to against a terror in presence of which energy and courage are alike unavailing.
We have always wondered a little why the dread of cataclysms enters so little into human calculations. There is no reason which can be stated why an epidemic, once raging, should not carry off a whole population, as seems to have hap- pened in Cambodia ; or why a fire, once started, should not consume a capital city, as one nearly did in Chicago; or why a storm wave thrown up by some sub-oceanic volcano should not sweep over a whole country drowning alike man and beast, and salting the mould till it would bear no crop, as happened to a populous island in the Ganges ; or why a vol- canic eruption should not occur, say, in Southern Europe on an inconceivably greater scale than that which destroyed Lisbon and the faith of Goethe. Those things have seldom happened; but they have happened, and they might any of them happen again and on a greater scale. The popular answer that God is too good, though it indicates a useful and, as we believe, a morally beneficial kind of faith, is not logic- ally defensible, for sudden death under terrible circumstances happens every day, and the goodness of God cannot be arraigned or doubted merely because many deaths, all of them inevitable within a short period, are permitted to occur at once. The multiplication of the common fate does not increase the cruelty of that fate: rather to most minds it diminishes it. Nor is the reason a general submissiveness to irresistible Jaw, for men shrink from death, which will come, shrink as they may, and the terror of an approaching comet seen in the heavens will shake the nerves of whole populations. We sus- pect that as man is forbidden to see even five minutes ahead of the actual present, so his imagination has for the most part been mercifully dulled as to dangers not perceptible to his senses. At least we find it difficult to account otherwise for the entire disregard which, until the pestilence arrives, ordinary populations show for sanitary laws. Southern Italians are exceedingly, even exceptionally, nervous in the presence of epidemics ; but the Neapolitans, who when cholera breaks out threaten their doctors, would rebel if their city were cleaned and drained till cholera could gain no hold. Even the English, who trust their municipalities and know their doctors will not poison them, are often immovable as to sanitary precautions, saying in their minds, like an old care- taker whom the writer once reproved for mismanaging gas, "If we are to burn, we shall burn for sure." The mind will not take in more than it will hold, and if the Observatory people demonstrated that another world was approaching this one, and fifty years hence must collide with it, we doubt if the price of Consols would go down a point. There is a preserva- tive, as well as a destructive, stupidity in most of us, and if we knew that the "red cloud" moving towards Northern Europe brought with it a new, possibly a dangerous, epidemic, there would be more symptoms of annoyance than of panic. Nevertheless, those who reason should not forget that our security against cataclysms can hardly be considered more than empirical, that we know, for example, very little of what a storm-wave such as recently nearly destroyed Galveston could be or do, and that in particular our security against epidemics of a kind new to this generation has no scien- tific basis. We are cleaner than we were, but that is a poor
defence against germs which travel through the air and enter by the month. All we can say about them is that panic is never a help, and that the English insensibility to panic about such things, though it does not preserve us from such dangers, is a grand protection to our general happiness.
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