“An Earthquake Invention”

Abstract

WITH reference to the correspondence on this subject in this week's NATURE (vol. xxxii. p. 213), will you permit me to state that the gentleman to whose paper in the British Association Report for 1884 Prof. Piazzi Smyth refers has long been a resident of Japan, that he is now on a voyage from that country to Australia and New Zealand, and that it must, therefore, in the ordinary course of things, be some months before he can see and reply to the correspondence in queation. In the mean time, it may not be amiss to point out that the. capital of Japan is about 12,000 miles from the learned societies of Europe and their Proceedings, and that there, as described, a man must be content to work with what he finds as his hand; there are no great public libraries in which we can find out readily what has been done before in any particular field. Mr. Stevenson's paper appears to have been published twenty years ago, and the chances are that it never, from that time to the present, reached the East. That it never came to the Knowledge of “the B.A. man” will be readily believed by the many readers of NATURE who know what a careful and consciencious worker that man is. Besides, unless it be presumptuous in an unscientific person to say so, the learned Professor's solitary premiss does not at all support his amiable conclusion. If he will again examine the letters, to the publication of which he appears to have given his consent without a clear notion of what he was doing, he will doubtless perceive that one man may carry out experiments in Japan in 1884 without knowing that similar experiments had been carried out by another man in England in 1864; and when Prof. Piazzi Smyth has reached this point, it may occur to him that the tone and expressions of his letters, so far as they refer to the gentleman in Japan, require more consideration than they received when they were penned.