Note 228 — Chapter II · (continued 2)

A curious instance of association of ideas conquering the deadening effect of habit. Dr. Tschudi (Peru, p. 170), describing the panic, says, ‘no familiarity with the phenomenon can blunt this feeling.’ Beale (South-Sea Whaling Voyage, Lond. 1839, p. 205) writes, ‘it is said at Peru, that the oftener the natives of the place feel those vibrations of the earth, instead of becoming habituated to them, as persons do who are constantly exposed to other dangers, they become more filled with dismay every time the shock is repeated, so that aged people often find the terror a slight shock will produce almost insupportable.’ Compare Darwin's Journal, pp. 422, 423. So, too, in regard to Mexican earthquakes, Mr. Ward observes, that ‘the natives are both more sensible than strangers of the smaller shocks, and more alarmed by them.’ Ward's Mexico, vol. ii. p. 55. On the physiological effects of the fear caused by earthquakes, see the remarkable statement by Osiander in Burdach's Physiologie comme Science d'Observation, vol. ii. pp. 223, 224. That the fear should be not deadened by familiarity, but increased by it, would hardly be expected by speculative reasoners unacquainted with the evidence; and we find, in fact, that the Pyrrhonists asserted that οὁ γοῦν σεισμὰ παρ᾽ οὗς συνεχῶς ἀποτελοῦνται, οὐ θαυμάζοντο⋅ οὐδ᾽ ὁ ἥλιος, ὅτι καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ὁράαι. Diog. Laert. de Vitis Philos. lib. ix. segm. 87, vol. i. p. 591.