Excerpt from San Francisco's Great Disaster: A Full Account of the Recent Terrible Destruction of Life and Property by Earthquake, Fire and Volcano in California and at VesuviusThe world seems secure on her foundations, the heavens eternal, the universe unshakable, man supreme, until, in one of these dread hours, the narrow border between order and chaos, between law and anarchy in nature's realm, ends man's dream of supremacy, ends his faith that the universe is unshakable, that the heavens are eternal, that Old Earth is secure on her foundations. Such a revelation is the destruction of San Francisco. It is not alone the posses sion of the people of the day on which the awful visita tion has fallen, but the property of all the ages, a pointed lesson of the mutability of the finite, a grim fable whose moral points to the realms of the Divme and infinite. The lesson is for all peoples, everywhere, for who can tell where next nature will run riot? Who knows that the next out break of elemental anarchy will confine devastation to a single locality? Who can give security that the globe in its entirety will not crumble into dust when next the natural law is violated?About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.