Abstract
FEW disasters impress the mind so vividly with human helplessness as those that arise from disturbance of the solid ground beneath our feet. The most devastating hurricane can in some measure be foreseen and provided against. Skill and foresight continually do battle with the fury of the waves, and prove on the whole victorious. We are so familiar with the restlessness of air and ocean that the havoc wrought by these elemental powers does not carry with it the sense of aught unusual or against which we may not hope successfully to contend. But to find that the earth beneath us, to which we have, consciously or not, trusted as the only stable feature in our landscape, gives way in a moment of unsuspicious calm, that the everlasting hills are themselves perishable like everything else, that ruin and death may in an instant overwhelm alike scenes of sylvan quiet and of active human industry, brings to the mind that practically experiences the sensation a horror to which there is hardly any parallel in the long list of calamities that thin the ranks of mankind.
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Landslips . Nature 22, 505–506 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022505a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022505a0