is dangerous to build near the edge of a cliff. To architects, again, various hints have been given, both from experience accumulated on the spot, and also from that of Manila and other earthquake-shaken localities. The passage from natural to artificial vibrations being obvious, Professor Milne has been led on to the invention of a machine which records, after the manner of a seismograph, the vibrations of railway trains. This machine keeps an automatic record of all the motions of a train, and serves to detect irregularities occurring at crossings and points, as also those due to want of ballast, defects in bridges, and so on.
Thus, imperfect as it still is, imperfect as the nature of the case may perhaps condemn it always to remain, the science of seismology has already borne practical fruit in effecting a saving of tens of thousands of dollars. To those who are interested in seismometers and seismographs, in earthquake maps and earthquake catalogues, in seismic surveys, in microseisms, earth tremors, earth pulsations, and generally in earth physics, we recommend a perusal of the Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan, complete in sixteen volumes, of its continuation, the Seismological Journal of Japan, and of the volume entitled Earthquakes, by Professor Milne in the "International Scientific Series." Volume IX. Part II. of the Seismological Transactions is specially devoted to the volcanoes of Japan, and contains a mass of statistics, anecdotes, historical details, and illustrations,—each individual volcano, from the northernmost of the Kuriles down to Aso-san in Kyūshū, which has the largest crater in the world, being treated of in detail. The Ansei Kemhm Roku and the Ansei Kembun Shi are capitally illustrated Japanese accounts of the great earthquake which wrecked Yedo in 1855. Lovers of the ghastly will search long before they find anything more to their taste than the delineations there given of men and women precipitated out of windows, cut in two by falling beams, bruised, smashed, imprisoned in cellars, overtaken by tidal waves, or worse still, burnt alive in one of the great fires caused by the
