Bakerian lecture.—“Recent advances in seismology.”

All who are interested in the progress of science recoguise that at the present time Seismology receives an attention vastly different from that accorded to it only a few years ago. The old Seismology consisted of but little more than scattered accounts of great convulsions which altered the appearance of vast tracts of country and which were frequently accompanied by appalling destruction. For the most part these accounts were little better than the narratives which, in early times, exciting the imagination of primitive communities, gave rise to myths which have left their mark in literature, art, and religion. Not until the interval between the years 1840 and 1860 by the strenuous labours of many workers, amongst whom Perry and Mallet were conspicuous, was a general knowledge of the distribution of earthquakes in space and time reached. Mallet, in his classical work on the Neapolitan earthquake of 1859, drawn up under the auspices of the Royal Society, showed that from the ruins of a town many facts of scientific importance could be gathered. This work together with that of a few other seismologists, gave the first indications that earthquake phenomena lent themselves to systematic investigation. But little further progress was made until 1880, when as a side issue of Japan’s material development along western lines, Seismology began to grow with great rapidity into its present form and became a distinct branch of observational science.