England was shaken on Thursday morning at 5.30 am, by
an earthquake of an unusual kind. It seemed as if the western side of the island had been struck from below by some tremendous force which distributed itself north, east, and south, on certain lines in the interior of the earth. The shock, or whatever it was—Mr. Milne, the seismologist, apparently suggests that a low stratum of rock filled up a chasm — was felt all over Wales, throughout the Midlands, in the environs of London, and in Bristol, and, of course, at all points between those points. No serious injury was done except at Hereford, where the pinnacles of the Church of St. Nicholas fell down, and the Cathedral was badly shaken, but the alarm created was great, and the recognition that an earthquake had occurred nearly universal. It is possible that the move- ment here was the last ripple of a much more serious com- motion at a great distance, perhaps in Iceland, but up to Friday afternoon no tidings of such an event had been received. So little are earthquakes feared in this country that the Greenwich Observatory takes no cognisance of them ; but no one, how- aver inexperienced, ever mistakes the real tremor for anything ?lee, and few resist the feeling of excessive dread. The writer remembers well to have seen a friend, a man of rather un- usually cool nerves, made violently sick by the tremor as it passed, flinging down all clocks and rattling all doors in its way.
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