Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan, Vol. 12 (Classic Reprint)

Download or read book Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan, Vol. 12 (Classic Reprint) written by Jishin Gakkai and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan, Vol. 12 That the lower animals show signs of alarm at the time of a severe shaking is an observation hardly requiring explanation. If, on the contrary, it had been observed that they did not exhibit feelings of uneasiness an explanation might be necessary. The observations which do require an explanation are those where animals have shown a strange behaviour a short time before an earthquake, which so far as I can learn is usually 10 or 30 seconds in advance of the actual shaking. The only explanation which I can offer for- this phenomenon is that such animals are sensitive to small tremors which precede nearly all large earthquakes. Diagrams of earthquake motion showing these preliminary tremors, which have an amplitude of less than of a millimeter and are performed at the rate of six per second, have been published in the Transactions of this Society. If we were living on a hard, rocky formation the amplitude of these movements might be less and their frequency increased. If we are standing up, or down-stairs, or out of doors, we do not feel them, but if we are upstairs, sitting down, and alt is quiet, they may occasionally be recognized. I have felt them, taken out my watch and noted the time 10 or 15 seconds before the actual earthquake came. On one occasion two of my friends, seated in an upstairs room, noticed them, while I myself, standing, endeavoured to detect them but failed. The problem before us may therefore be explained upon the assumption that certain of the lower animals are sensitive to small motions which we pass by unnoticed. The alarm of intelligent animals like dogs and horses may be the result of their own experience, which has taught them that small tremors are premonitory of movements more alarming. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.