were several hundreds which lost a large portion of their walls.  There were very many also which remained standing, but so badly shattered that public safety required that they should be pulled down altogether.  There was not, so far as at present is known, a brick or stone building which was not more or less cracked, and in most of them the cracks were a permanent disfigurement and a source of danger and inconvenience.”  In some places the railway track was curiously distorted.  “It was often displaced laterally, and sometimes alternately depressed and elevated.  Occasionally several lateral flexures of double curvature and of great amount were exhibited.  Many hundred yards of track had been shoved bodily to the south eastward.”

The ground was fissured at some places in the city to a depth of many feet, and numerous “craterlets” were formed, from which sand was ejected in considerable quantities.  These are not uncommon phenomena, and were due, no doubt, to the squirting of water out of saturated sandy layers not far below the surface; these being squeezed between two less pervious beds in the passage of the earthquake wave.  The ejected material in the Charleston earthquake was ordinary sand, such as might exist in many districts which had been quite undisturbed by any concussions of the earth.

Captain Dutton made a careful study of the observations collected by himself and others concerning this earthquake, and came to the conclusion that the Charleston wave traveled with unusual speed, for its mean velocity was about 17,000 feet a second.  The focus of the disturbance was also ascertained.  Apparently it was a double one, the two centres being about thirteen miles apart, and the line joining them running nearly the same distance to the west of Charleston.  The approximate depth of the principal focus is given as twelve miles, with a possible error of less than two miles; that of the minor one as roughly eight miles.

The Charleston earthquake was felt as a tremor of more or less force through a wide area, embracing 900,000 square miles, and affecting nearly the whole country east of the Mississippi.  It is said that the yield of the Pennsylvania natural gas wells decreased, and that a geyser in the Yellowstone valley burst into action after four years of rest.  The movement of the earth-wave was in general north and south, deflected to east and west, and the snake-like fashion in which rails on the railroad were bent indicated both a vertical and a lateral force.

This earthquake has been attributed to various causes, but geological experts think that it was due to a slip in the crust along the Appalachian Mountain chain.  There is a line of weakness along the eastern slope of this chain, characterized by fissures and faults, and it was thought that a strain had been gradually brought to bear upon this through the removal of earth from the land by rains and rivers and its deposition in thick strata on the sea-bottom.  It is supposed that this variation in weight in time caused a yielding of the strata and a slip seaward of the great coastal plain.  Professor Mendenhall, however, thinks it was due to a readjustment of the earth’s crust to its gradually sinking nucleus.