Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857 Vol 2.djvu/48

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SIGNOR MORANO'S HOUSE.
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small octagonal building, whose faces are cardinal, had two blocks projected from its walls. Assuming the wave velocity, the same here as at Polla, Padula, &c., viz., 13 feet per second, one of these gave, for the ; the other, : both had descended from a height of 21 feet, and the latter had been thrown horizontally 15·75 feet, giving for the emergence an angle between 15° 18' for the one, and 18° 22' for the other, the latter being, in fact, the angle of maximum range. The former block had possibly, touched in its fall; the latter appeared unexceptionable, and, allowing for a very slight adherence in the block of stone, the value of e, may be taken here at 17° to 18°, and from the N.W.

The two blocks were thrown very nearly in the same direction at (Fig. 277, Coll. Roy. Soc.), and gave a wave-path 150° E. of north to south, which coincided with the deductions, from two pairs of large fissures, and in a dwelling-house of two stories close beside. The ground on which these are built slopes slightly to the east.

The house in which I slept, and in which Don Antonio Morano and his wife were lodging, a very large and heavily-built old one, had fissures open at the quoins, and in other places, 4 to 4½ inches wide at the wall plates (two high stories). These gave a rough estimation of the amplitude of the wave, the walls being very thick and inelastic; but the fissures were too perplexed by other adjoining buildings for calculation as to direction.

The mansion that Don Antonio lived in at the time of the earthquake, is almost wholly destroyed: it is at the extreme east side of the town, at the opposite side of the

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