The fearful privations and heart-rending calamities which visited the earlier inhabitants of the earth are only known to the student of the cosmos of nature after he has attained the second birth. The forces within and around the earth are now in comparative subjugation, but in the earlier periods of its existence, while still it was in the process of changing from a state adapted to a lower condition of animal life to one fitted to a higher state of animal and intellectual existence, the elements were in a frequent state of rupture and disorder. No mortal pen can depict the scene which I recently witnessed on the occurrence of the earthquake on the Pacific coast. Forty thousand souls arising amid smoke and blackened clouds of flying stones and upheaving earth, with outstretched arms, and faces strained with horror, emerging suddenly from their old bodies into their spirit-forms--looking awestruck into each other’s faces; a vast swarm clinging together almost as helplessly as young bees to their hive--suddenly cut off from their occupations and their pleasures, their homes, and their familiar affairs of earth! But what they experienced, proud and noble cities of the past have experienced likewise. Grace and ornament, art and grandeur, beauty, love, and manly strength have been swept away time and again by the bursting of the treacherous doors that lead into the heart of the earth! Change marks the footsteps of the Creator. The solid mountain, the firm, unyielding earth, which to the unthinking mind seem durable and eternal in their strength, like mankind carry within themselves the seeds of their own dissolution. Yet the day will come when man, by the aid of science, will, through these premonitory symptoms, foresee the coming events, even as the wise physician can discern the time when his patient’s soul will leave its body. Nature misunderstood is a fearful mystery; but understood, she is a simple and beautiful piece of mechanism; and the earthquake may not be more disastrous than the flood or the avalanche when science and experience have taught men to avoid the localities of danger, and to watch the hour of its approach, that they may flee before it. Nature is never abrupt in her actions. She heralds her intentions long before she enacts them, but as it requires the quick ear of the savage--the child of nature--to detect the far-off prey, so it requires the student of nature to discover the distant tread of the earthquake. SIR DAVID BREWSTER _NATURALNESS OF SPIRIT LIFE_.