While the recent horrors at Ischia and in Java excite much painful interest in the public mind, they naturally recall similar scenes of other years. Earthquakes of less destructive violence are very frequent, and suggest greater power than is exerted. Even the slight trembling, or vibratory motions, that produce no material injury, remind us of the prodigious forces that may at any moment burst their barriers with great violence. In every perceptible shock we feel the mighty pulsations of the agitated molten mass whose waves dash against the walls that restrain them; or the struggling of compressed elastic gases, that must have vent, though their escape rend the earth. The crust between us and the seas of fire, whose extent no man knoweth, may be in places weakening, cut away, as the inner walls of a furnace by the molten metal; so the danger may be nearer and greater than is known or feared. A devout man finds refuge and a comfortable assurance in the truth, “The Lord reigneth; in his hands are the deep places of the earth. The strength of the hills is his also.” There are records of earthquakes more ancient than any books written by men. They antedate the earliest chapters of human history, and probably belonged to the pre-adamite earth. If no human ear heard their tread, the footprints are still visible. In all mountainous regions the evidence of their upheaval by some mighty force is too plain to be doubted. The marine fossils found far up on their heights, the position of strata, often far from horizontal, with immense fissures, and chasms of unknown depth, all tell of disturbances that may have taken place before the historic period. If in those primitive times mountains were literally carried into the midst of the sea, and vast tracts of the ocean’s bed shoved up thousands of feet, it was only a more terrible display of the gigantic powers still in action, and of whose workings the centuries have borne witness. No country seems to have escaped these terrible visitations, though some suffer more than others. Volcanoes being of the same origin, they are more frequent in volcanic regions, and perhaps by their shocks the seething caldrons have been uncovered. The same localities, as Southern Italy, and the neighboring island of Sicily, have, from a remote period, at times been terribly shaken. From 1783 to 1786 a thousand shocks were made note of, five hundred of which are described as having much force. Lyell considers them of special importance, not because differing from like disturbances in other places, but because observed and minutely described by men competent to collect and state such physical facts in a way to show their bearing on the science of the earth. The following, collected from Lyell, Gibbon, Humboldt, and the encyclopædias, are facts respecting some of the principal earthquakes on record. Their statements, much condensed, are not given in chronological order, but as we find them: