The Library.

a

the

Plays and Masques at Court, 1558-1642. By
Mary Susan Steele. (Yale University Press:
London, Humphrey Milford. 188. net).
and
nature of the case, not presenting any-
thing much that is actually new, this careful
compilation has and deserves its place in our
array of apparatus for the understanding of
Elizabethan and Stuart drama. No one before
had put together quite this material and for
this whole period. A "court performance " is
taken to mean any dramatic representation
before the sovereign or other members of the
royal family wheresoever given, excluding, how-
ever, mere shows and pageants. After the
chronological list which forms the bulk of the
book come a list of the principal works cited, an
index of authors, and an index of titles, to
which we wish Dr. Steele had seen fit to add

an index of the several places in which the
plays and masques were performed, for to this,
too, belong interesting considerations. White-
hall is, naturally, the main theatre. Of the
dozen occasions or so when a play of Shake-
speare's was put on at Court under James I
and Charles I, Whitehall-Banqueting House
or Great Hall or Cockpit-was always the
scene. For the two or three plays of his con-
jectured to have been acted before Elizabeth,
however, the players went to Hampton Court,
to Greenwich and to Windsor. Hampton Court,
in Elizabeth's day, if it does not vie with
Whitehall in the point of a crowded theatrical
history, makes no bad second.

The playwright whose work was most in
request at Court during this time was Ben
Jonson, after him Beaumont and Fletcher.
In 1637 there was a Court performance of The
Cid' in Joseph Rutter's translation. Occa-
sionally plays were such as, not without reason,
to wound the susceptibilities of ambassadors,
as when in 1622 the Cambridge people enter-
tained James I with Hacket's play, 'Loyola,'
or when, in 1558/9, at Westminster, there was
enacted a farce in which crows appeared in the
habits of Cardinals, asses in those of Bishops,
and wolves in those of Abbots. Note of this
Papers, and Dr. Steele has gleaned several
was found in the Calendars of Venetian State
other interesting particulars from printed
good, concise account of the original sources,
sources of this kind. Her Preface gives a
and of earlier work on all this material.

Press.

The Founders of Seismology. By Charles
Davison. (Cambridge University
12s. 6d. net.).
EISMOLOGY

SEIS

resembles astronomy and
physics in having the history of its pro-
gress connected with personalities of worth and
charm apart from their genius and their scien-
tific achievement. Dr. Davison lets these per-
sonal qualities through, even though he is
mainly occupied with detail and final outcome
of the work of the several founders of seis-
mology. One of the most attractive of them all
is the eighteenth century John Michell, fellow
of Queen's College, Cambridge, and professor of
geology in that university, who lectured not
only on mathematics but likewise on Greek and
Hebrew. When marriage separated him from
Cambridge he retired to a country living near
Winchester first, then at Havant, then at
Thornhill in Yorkshire, where he died. He was
an excellent parish priest and a good neigh-
and in spite of all the parochial and
social demands upon him found time and
energy to carry on scientific work of the first
importance, requiring, too, the patient exer-
cise of mental power of a high order. His
contributions of permanent value to the science
of seismology Dr. Davison takes to be his dis-
tinction between the phenomena accompanying
an earthquake which are essential to it and
those which are not; his attempt to give a con-
sistent theory of the origin of earthquakes, in
which he appears to have hit the truth in his
account of earthquake-sounds and of seismic
sea-waves; and lastly the two methods he
devised-overlooked since his day, and then
re-invented--for determining the position of
the epicentre.

The next important worker is Alexis Perrey,
son of a forest-ranger on the Haute-Marne,
who worked for thirty years at Dijon, as pro-
fessor of mathematics and director of the
municipal observatory. He contributed little
to positive knowledge, though he put forward
suggestions for new terms in the science, and
a theory concerning lunar periodicity in earth-
quakes which was a good deal discussed; his
claim to recognition rests on the records he
made, his annual lists and regional memoirs.

Still more noteworthy was his contemporary Robert Mallet, a Dublin man whose principal work for the earlier years of his life was engineering. At about thirtyfive years of age, while he was building a railway station, his notice was caught by the diagram in Lyell's Principles of the two pillars which had had their upper parts twisted, but not overthrown, in an earthquake. He perceived that the explanation given of this was incorrect; and he perceived what was the right explanation, and thence went on to a general consideration of the dynamics of earthquakes, which he embodied in a memoir, to be regarded, as Dr. Davison says, whatever its imperfections, " as one of the chief foundation-stones of seismology as a science." This was followed up by several studies of earthquake-phenomena, the last of which, discussing the great Neapolitan earthquake of 1857, is the first scientific investigation of its kind. Besides this, we owe to Mallet the invention of several terms now in use-among them seismology itself; the statement of the laws that govern the distribution of earthquakes in time and space; and a determining influence upon the whole point of view by which the methods of the study were in those early days controlled.

"6

From him and some notes on his successors we pass to a chapter on the study of earth quakes in Italy-the work that is, of Palmieri and Bertelli, of De Rossi, Mercalli and Tacchini. This is, naturally, but a summary chapter; Dr. Davison, however, writes well, and what he is forced to compress does not thereby lose life and colour. The great service rendered by the Italian seismologists is their impressive series of earthquake investigations, with the erection of the first observatory for seismological purposes, and the invention of the first sensitive recording instrument. The seismological work of Central Europe has achieved most in the way of making out connexion between earthquakes and the structure of the earth's crust, and establishing the pos sibility of multiple origin for some earthquakes. To these workers, too, are owing the construction of isoseismal lines and the determination of the epicentre by means of them, as well as the use of time-records in determining the depth of the focus. The seismologists of the United States have done brilliant work in the study of special earthquakes, and also in the compilation of earthquake-catalogues for special districts.

We come next to Montessus de Ballore, the great French seismologist, who, after a military training side by side with Marshal Foch, was sent as a young captain of artillery to San Salvador, and there began the pursuit of his life by studying earthquakes in his leisure hours. The immensity of his labours is astonishing. He has left, unpublished but accessible to students, a catalogue of 171,434 earthquakes. His Géographie Seismologique' of 1906, was followed in 1907 by La Science Séismologique ';

"

in 1917 he published a text-book 'La Séismologie Moderne' and towards the close of his life, he turned in another direction and produced a number of historical essays besides the work of his vast bibliography of seismology. It must increase astonishment to recollect that to all the work we have mentioned, and numerous memoirs besides, must be added no inconsiderable amount of work in the way of criticism of other seismologists.

The two closing chapters of the book are devoted respectively to John Milne and to Fusakichi Omori. In both of these we reach a new stage in seismological study, which has as one main characteristic more definite and active co-operation among seismologists, and as another, the prominence of their interest in Japan. Milne was the founder of the Seismological Society of Japan, for which he justly claimed that it marked an epoch in the history of the science. It was formed in 1880 and continued its work till 1892, in which year, upon the wellsupported petition of Baron Kikuchi, was formed the Imperial Earthquake Investigation Committee. Of this Fusakichi Omori was president from 1897 to 1923. In the late summer of 1923 he was returning home from Australia, his health on the journey steadily declining; he arrived at Tokyo just after the great earthquake and fire of Sept. 1, and died there in the University Hospital, on Nov. 8, having received a day or two before his death the highest order of the Sacred Treasure. The lives of these two great seismologists bring before the reader a perfectly staggering amount of work accomplished, whether we consider the range of their researches, or the bulk of their output, the immensity of the mere records of fact, or again the importance of their total achievement-particularly where Omori is concerned. This is, indeed, an admirable book.

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