out of which they were never to get a profit, but, at the best, only bare reimbursement of what they had spent on it. The effect of the decision on the minds of the people of the territory coincided with its effect on the shareholders. Previously there had been no serious movement in the direction of ending the Company's rule. Indeed at the only General Election for the local Legislative Council, held early in 1914, at which the continuance or otherwise of that rule had been at issue, a Council had been returned almost unanimously in favour of its continuance; but now the people began to feel that they had outgrown the Company's maternal tutelage and that the time had come for a step forward in constitutional development. There followed, on the one hand, a long, tedious, and unedifying dispute between the Crown and the Company as to the amount to which the Company was entitled under the Judicial Committee's decision, and as to the mode in which the Crown should pay its debt; and, on the other hand, a controversy as to whether Southern Rhodesia should seek for the status of a separate self-governing colony or for incorporation in the Union of South Africa.

The spirit in which the predecessors of the present British Government conducted the former dispute was described, last March, in restrained language by the President of the Company, when, in addressing the shareholders, he said that he did not believe that any of the gentlemen who had held the office of Secretary of State since the Privy Council judgment would have adopted in their private affairs the course which had so far been followed on behalf of the Crown. The Government approached the problem in a fairer and more businesslike manner, and settled it with the Company by the payment of a lump sum, the acceptance of which, though it falls far short of what the Company might reasonably have expected, was felt, at any rate, to be preferable to the endless prospect of litigation with the Crown which appeared to be the only alternative.

The Constitutional controversy was settled when, as the result of a referendum held in October 1922, the electorate of Southern Rhodesia decided by a majority of, roughly, six to four to reject the liberal terms on which General Smuts was prepared to propose to his

parliament the incorporation of the territory as a fifth province of the Union, and to accept instead a constitution, which, save for a pretended and probably illusory reservation to the Imperial authority of control over native affairs, established local Responsible Government on terms similar to those on which that form of Government has been given to other Colonies.

The final result of the work of the Company is that, at a cost of millions to itself, and at comparatively trifling cost to the Crown, it has in a little more than thirty years brought Southern Rhodesia to a stage at which it has been deemed fit to take its place as a selfgoverning Colony of the British Empire; and Northern Rhodesia to a stage at which the Crown is prepared itself to assume direct responsibility for its government.

As a ruling authority the Company is repeating the history of its predecessors. It is dying in giving birth; and though as a commercial corporation it survives with large resources and most valuable rights, the fruits of its administrative labours have been reaped by others. Politely complimentary phrases in regard to those labours have fallen freely from ministerial lips; but any more tangible proof of gratitude for its acknowledged services to the Empire has been conspicuously lacking. Gratitude, however, is not a virtue of Princes, as those learn who put their trust in them; and if Queen Elizabeth is privileged to observe from another world the dealings of the Crown with the British South Africa Company, she need hardly blush for her own treatment of the adventurers by whose enterprise she profited in her day.

Yet those connected with the British South Africa Company may derive a not unworthy satisfaction from the reflexion that they have disproved the text-book maxim that a trading corporation cannot govern; and have shown that, if it be true that the functions of government and commerce are incompatible, in their case at least it is the commercial interest and not the work of administration and development that has suffered. Whatever may be the theoretical objections to its dual nature the last of the great Chartered Companies may await with confidence the judgment of history on its public achievements.

DOUGAL MALCOLM.

Art. 7.-THE STUDY OF EARTHQUAKES.

ON Sept. 1 last the world was shocked by the news that the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama had been destroyed by a great earthquake. The Greenwich time of the main shock can be given within a few seconds as 20h. 51m. 23s. (or nearly 4 a.m. summer time), which is just after noon at Tokyo, so that the terrors of darkness were not in this case added to the confusion. But the disaster was appalling enough without them. Earthquakes which overthrow cities generally bring both fire and flood in their train, and Yokohama seems to have suffered chiefly from fire. Many survivors were gathered as quickly as possible on to relief ships sent from Kobe, and at one time the abandonment of the city was contemplated; but the resilience of the human race is so remarkable that the work of reconstruction began almost immediately the work of succour and rescue was well in hand. The whole incident is still so fresh in our memories that there seems scarcely any need to repeat the details here. We remember the anxious inquiries for friends who might have been involved, with their varying issues. Earthquakes, and especially Japanese earthquakes, are so closely associated in many minds with the name of John Milne that it will be welcome news that his widow, who returned to Japan after the war, and settled in Tokyo, was fortunately away on a visit to Hakodate. The University of Tokyo suffered grievously; but the observatory escaped.

It

On such terrible occasions it seems almost sacrilege to turn from the human suffering to the scientific aspect of the destruction. But the Japanese learnt thoroughly the lessons inculcated by Milne and his colleagues in the last quarter of the 19th century, and we may feel confident that scientific observation and measurement of the effects of the earthquake began almost at once. is more than half a century since Robert Mallet pointed out the importance of losing as little time as possible in instituting investigations on the spot, for reasons which we could almost put directly into the mouth of Mr Sherlock Holmes. On Dec. 16, 1857, there was a destructive earthquake near Naples, accounts of which 'began to arrive in England, through correspondence

and the public press, about Dec. 24.' (News travelled slowly in those days, recent though they seem.) On Dec. 28 Mallet wrote to the President of the Royal Society offering to hasten to Italy to investigate the matter, if 150l. could be found for his expenses. The urgency and novelty of the enterprise are both shown clearly by the following sentence:

'Within the last ten years only seismology has taken its place in cosmic science, and up to this time no earthquake has had its secondary or resultant phenomena sought for, observed, and discussed by a competent investigator-by one conversant with the dynamic laws of the hidden forces we are called upon to ascertain by means of the more or less permanent traces they have left. . . . Observed without such guiding light, or often passed by unnoticed and undiscovered for want of it, the facts hitherto recorded are in great part valueless.'

The appeal was successful, and Mallet spent some months collecting on the spot information which he digested in two most valuable volumes, published in 1862. In them Mallet did not neglect the general reader, who might expect the 'charm that belongs to tales of shipwreck, of battle or wild adventure,' but he warns him that he will find the 'events by which such multitudes perished and in which so many cities were overthrown, sobered to an extent not always found in earthquake stories,' and, moreover, utilised for purposes of extracting information about such matters as the depth of the focus of the main shock, which Mallet puts at about eight miles below the earth's surface. Near the end of his work he gives us a more precise view of the exaggerations which he has thus 'sobered.' 'The well-known Jamaica earth fissures.' he writes,' that were said to have opened and closed with the wave, and bit people in two, must be regarded as audacious fables.' And again :

'The vulgar mind, filled from infancy with superstitions of terror as to "the things under the earth," is seized at once by the notion of these fissures of profound and fathomless depth, with "fire and vapour of smoke" issuing from within their murky abysses; but they should cease to belong to science.'

The lessons taught by Mallet have not been wasted.

Destructive earthquakes have since that time generally called into being an investigating committee, which has issued a voluminous report. The California earthquake, April 18, 1906, for instance, prompted a State Earthquake Investigation Commission which produced a report of 650 large quarto pages-800 words to each-with 200 plates and maps. It would require hard work, or some effrontery, to claim even a moderate acquaintance with earthquake literature nowadays. Some of it, of course, it is not necessary to retain in the memory. The Californian Commission has found itself no more able than Mallet to exclude the sensational or the curious. Among the pictures of destruction at Leland Stanford University, for instance, is one of a statue of Louis Agassiz which had been thrown from a lofty position, had struck the paved floor with its head so forcibly as to break a large hole, and was left in an almost vertical position, but with its base in the air, the body but little damaged, and the head completely submerged to the shoulders. There is certainly a modicum of information bearing on the earthquake to be extracted from the circumstances of this impressive fall; but the main interest of the picture, which demands its inclusion in the Report, is independent of this scientific utility.

We come now to the important difference between this Report and that of Mallet. In 1857 information gathered from the ruins of a destructive earthquake was the chief stock-in-trade of the seismologist; indeed, he had scarcely any other; but by 1906 the records of seismographs at distant stations had been added, and Part II of the California report is devoted to these novel and fertile fields of study. It should be clearly understood that they supplement and do not supplant the earlier seismological work. It is still as desirable as ever to note the directions in which columns have been overthrown or the angle through which they have been twisted; or to draw contour lines of various degrees of destructiveness, delimiting the areas within which houses have been first of all demolished entirely; secondly, partially damaged; and thirdly, only shaken: or the regions within which people were killed, or merely felt a slight shake, and so on. Such contour lines envelope the epicentre in a manner which is very instructive as