Affecting narratives are preserved of mothers saved after the fifth, sixth, and even seventh day of their interment, when their infants or children had perished with hunger. In his work on the great Neapolitan earthquake of 1857, Mr. Mallet, from innumerable narratives of personal peril and sad adventure, selects the distressing case of a noble family of Monte Murro, as affording a vivid picture of the terrors of an earthquake night. Don Andrea del Fino, the owner of one of the few houses in the city which escaped total destruction, was with his wife in bed, his daughter sleeping in an adjacent chamber on the principal floor. At the first shock his wife, who was awake, leaped from bed, and immediately after, a mass of the vaulting above came down, and buried her sleeping husband. At the same moment, the vault above their daughter’s room fell in upon her. From the light and hollow construction of the vaults neither was at once killed. The signora escaped by leaping from the front window, she scarcely knew how. For more than two hours she wandered, unnoticed, amongst the mass of terrified survivors in the streets, before she could obtain aid from her own tenants and dependants, to extricate her husband. They got him out after more than eighteen hours’ entombment—alive, indeed, but maimed and lame for life. His daughter was dead. As he lay longing despairingly for release from the rubbish, which a second shock, an hour after the first, had so shaken and closed in around him that he could scarcely breathe, he heard, but a few feet off, her agonising cries and groans grow fainter and fainter, until at last they died away. His wife, to whose devotion his own life was owing, had escaped unhurt. Unfortunately man too often vies with the brute forces of nature to increase the horrors of a great earthquake. As the arm of the law is paralysed by the general panic, thieves and ruffians are not slow to avail themselves of their opportunity. Thus in the Calabrian catastrophe of 1783, nothing could be more atrocious than the conduct of the peasants, who abandoned the farms and flocked in great numbers into the towns—not to rescue their countrymen from a lingering death, but to plunder. They dashed through the streets amid tottering walls and clouds of dust, trampling beneath their feet the bodies of the wounded and half buried, and often stripping them, while yet living, of their clothes. From the vast ruin and misery they entail, it is evident that where earthquakes are frequent, there can never be perfect security of property even under the best government; and as the fruits collected by the labour of many years may be lost in an instant, the progress of civilisation and national wealth must necessarily be retarded.