The recent observations of your correspondent MR. NOAKE (Vol. vi., p. 531.)
on the superstitions of the people of Worcestershire regarding the weather,
have called my attention to the present extraordinary wet season, on which
subject I have been asked many questions. Although I do not account myself
any more weatherwise than my neighbours, yet I may note that, for many
years past, I have remarked that whenever we have had any very serious
volcanic disturbance in the Mediterranean or its neighbourhood, or at Mount
Hecla, we have always had some corresponding atmospheric agitation in this
country, either in excessive heat or moisture, or both, and accompanied
with very perceptible vibrations, at times so strong as to answer the name
of earthquakes; and these vibrating so generally in the direction from
north-west to south-east, I have been convinced that underneath us there is
a regular steam passage from Mount Hecla in Iceland to Mount Vesuvius in
Italy. I have unfortunately mislaid my memoranda on this subject, and have
no regular roster of these occasional visitations to refer to, but I think
my attention to this effect was first impressed on me by the season which
followed the destruction at Lisbon in 1796. I recollect a friend of mine,
the late Mr. Empson, of Bouley, while attending some drainage improvements
in his carrs within the Level of Ancholme, was aroused by an extraordinary
noise, which he thought was occasioned by some "drunken fools," as he
called them, racing with their waggons upon the turnpike road above the
hill, which was two miles off from where he then was in the carrs. His
uphill shepherd, however, told him, when he got home, that there had been
no such occurrence as he supposed on the turnpike, as, had such been the
case, he must have heard and seen it. The next day, however, added fresh
information, and better observers discovered that the noise heard across
the carrs was underground; and further intelligence confirmed the suspicion
that it was occasioned by a species of earthquake that had been felt at
different places with different intensities, through Yorkshire and
Lancashire, and amongst the islands west of Scotland; and afterwards came
the same kind of intelligence across France, confirming me in my
conclusions before noted. And ever since this period of 1796 we have never
had any extraordinary alternation of extreme heat or wet, without its being
to me the result of some accompanying volcanic agitation in Mount Hecla, or
Mount Vesuvius or its neighbourhood; and the recurrence of the violent
ebullition that has this year being going on at Mount Etna may therefore be
considered as the electric cause not only of the extraordinary heat of our
late summer, but also of the floods that have subsequently poured down upon
us. It is only of late years that scientific men have paid due attention to
these physical phenomena. Sir Humphrey Davy, I think, was the first who
laid down their causes; and if we recollect the account given by Sir
Stamford Raffles of the appalling effects of the tremendous explosion of
Tombora, in Sambowa, one of the islands east of Java, in the year 1815,
described as so violent in its immediate neighbourhood as to cause men, and
horses, and trees to be taken up into the air like chaff; and of its
effects being perceptible in Sumatra, where, nearly at a thousand miles
distance from it, they heard its thundering noisy explosions,--thinking of
this, we may well accede the comparatively small vibrations that we
occasionally feel, as arising from the interchange of civilities passing
between our volcanic neighbours Hecla and Vesuvius, or Etna; and glad we
may be that we have them in no more inconvenient shape or degree than we
have hitherto experienced them. I have some friends in Lancashire who have
been a good deal alarmed by the vibrations they have lately experienced;
and I must confess that my good wife and myself were, on the morning of the
10th Dec., not a little startled in our bed by a shock that aroused us
early to inquire after the cause of it, but for which we cannot account
otherwise than that, from its sudden electric character, the Lancashire
vibration had reached us. The chief purport, however, of my present
communication is, to make inquiry amongst your readers, whether any of
them, like myself, have observed and experienced any recurrence of these
concomitant and physical obtrusions.