Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Great Earthquakes, Which Interrupt The Long Series Of Slight
Shocks, Appear To Have No Regular Periods At Cumana.
They have
taken place at intervals of eighty, a hundred, and sometimes less
than thirty years; while on the coasts of Peru, for instance at
Lima, a certain regularity has marked the periods of the total
destruction of the city.
The belief of the inhabitants in the
existence of this uniformity has a happy influence on public
tranquillity, and the encouragement of industry. It is generally
admitted, that it requires a sufficiently long space of time for
the same causes to act with the same energy; but this reasoning is
just only inasmuch as the shocks are considered as a local
phenomenon; and a particular focus, under each point of the globe
exposed to those great catastrophes, is admitted. Whenever new
edifices are raised on the ruins of the old, we hear from those who
refuse to build, that the destruction of Lisbon on the first day of
November, 1755, was soon followed by a second, and not less fatal
convulsion, on the 31st of March, 1761.
It is a very ancient opinion,* (* Aristotle de Meteor. lib. 2 (ed.
Duval, tome 1 page 798). Seneca Nat. Quaest. lib. 6 c. 12.) and one
that is commonly received at Cumana, Acapulco, and Lima, that a
perceptible connection exists between earthquakes and the state of
the atmosphere that precedes those phenomena. But from the great
number of earthquakes which I have witnessed to the north and south
of the equator; on the continent, and on the seas; on the coasts,
and at 2500 toises height; it appears to me that the oscillations
are generally very independent of the previous state of the
atmosphere.
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