Forecaster Bendandi

One day last week an Italian cabinetmaker named Rafael Bendandi, whose avocation is seismology, announced that the morrow would bring a violent earthquake to the Euro-Asiatic border, that America would feel repercussions. Next day U. S. seismographs recorded a great shock somewhere in Asia. California quivered with minor shocks.

The frequent accuracy of the cabinet-maker's earthquake forecasts has awed Italians. Their Government has forbidden the printing of his prognostications for Italy. He frightens the peasants, depresses businessmen.

There is, however, nothing mysterious to Signor Bendandi's forecasts. Some 30,000 quakes ruffle the earth yearly. Patient men have compiled world catalogs of recognized quakes, viz., R. Mallet's Catalogue of Recorded Earthquakes (1606 B.C.-A.D. 1842), J. Milne's A Catalogue of Destructive Earthquakes (A.D. 1--1899). Others have brought the records up to date. Out of the records analysts have been able to decipher two groups of periodicity in earthquakes. In one group vigorous quakes occur once a year, faint ones every day. In the other group trifling temblors occur every 21 minutes and every 429 days; more or less violent ones every 11, 19, 22 and 33 years. To predict the approximate time & place of recurrence requires no great mathematical skill, especially if the seismologist has up-to-the-minute reports of the earthy quaverings going on all the time. To forecast the exact day and region as Cabinet-Maker Bendandi did last week, does, however, require a bold imagination.

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