At Yokohama, in Japan, more than 10,500 miles from Arica, an enormous wave poured in on August 14, but at what hour we have no satisfactory record. So far as distance is concerned, this wave affords most surprising evidence of the stupendous nature of the disturbance to which the waters of the Pacific Ocean had been subjected. The whole circumference of the earth is but 25,000 miles, so that this wave had travelled over a distance considerably greater than two-fifths of the earth’s circumference. A distance which the swiftest of our ships could not traverse in less than five or six weeks had been swept over by this enormous undulation in the course of a few hours. More complete details reach us from the Southern Pacific. Shortly before midnight the Marquesas Isles and the low-lying Tuamotu group were visited by the great wave, and some of these islands were completely submerged by it. The lonely Opara Isle, where the steamers which run between Panama and New Zealand have their coaling station, was visited at about half-past eleven in the evening by a billow which swept away a portion of the coal depôt. Afterwards great waves came rolling in at intervals of about twenty minutes, and several days elapsed before the sea resumed its ordinary ebb and flow. It was not until about half-past two on the morning of August 14, that the Samoa Isles (sometimes called the Navigator Islands) were visited by the great wave. The watchmen startled the inhabitants from their sleep by the cry that the sea was about to overwhelm them; and already, when the terrified people rushed from their houses, the sea was found to have risen far above the highest watermark. But it presently began to sink again, and then commenced a series of oscillations, which lasted for several days and were of a very remarkable nature. Once in every quarter of an hour the sea rose and fell, but it was noticed that it rose twice as rapidly as it sank. This peculiarity is well worth remarking. The eminent physicist Mallet speaks thus (I follow Lyell’s quotation) about the waves which traverse an open sea: ‘The great sea-wave, advancing at the rate of several miles in a minute, consists, in the deep ocean, of a long low swell of enormous volume, having an equal slope before and behind, and that so gentle that it might pass under a ship without being noticed. But when it reaches the edge of soundings its front slope becomes short and steep, while its rear slope is long and gentle.’ On the shores visited by such a wave, the sea would appear to rise more rapidly than it sank. We have seen that this happened on the shores of the Samoan group, and therefore the way in which the sea rose and fell on the days following the great earthquake gave significant evidence of the nature of the sea-bottom in the neighbourhood of these islands. As the change of the great wave’s figure could not have been quickly communicated, we may conclude with