Note 153 — SECTION IV. POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF ICELAND.

The day is past when the “determinate lines of fracture,” which resembled the empirical parallelism and the pentagonal networks of mountains, connected Hekla with Etna—yet it was an improvement upon the theory which made both of them mouths of the Inferno. Evidence to the latter purport has been given in our law-courts. The earthquake district of Iceland was popularly supposed to include Great Britain, Northern France, Denmark, Scandinavia, and Greenland—regions of the most diversified formation. The theory seemed to repose for base upon isolated cases of simultaneity, possibly coincidents. But, as Dr Lauder Lindsay remarks, contemporaneity would suggest a vast extension of these limits. The (Lisbon) earthquake of 1755, for instance, extended from Barbary to Iceland, from Persia to Santos in the Brazil. The earthquake of 1783 was equally damaging to Calabria and to Iceland. Even in 1872, there were, as has been shown, almost simultaneous movements in Syria, Naples, and Iceland.