Line	Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville
	(1819–1891) has limitations, such as its lack
	of inventive plots after Moby-Dick (1851) and its
	occasionally inscrutable style. A more serious, yet
(5)	problematic, charge is that Melville is a deficient
	writer because he is not a practitioner of the “art of
	fiction,” as critics have conceived of this art since the
	late nineteenth-century essays and novels of Henry
	James. Indeed, most twentieth-century commentators
(10)	regard Melville not as a novelist but as a writer of
	romance, since they believe that Melville’s fiction
	lacks the continuity that James viewed as essential
	to a novel: the continuity between what characters
	feel or think and what they do, and the continuity
(15)	between characters’ fates and their pasts or original
	social classes. Critics argue that only Pierre (1852),
	because of its subject and its characters, is close to
	being a novel in the Jamesian sense.
	However, although Melville is not a Jamesian
(20)	novelist, he is not therefore a deficient writer. A more
	reasonable position is that Melville is a different
	kind of writer, who held, and should be judged
	by, presuppositions about fiction that are quite
	different from James’s. It is true that Melville wrote
(25)	“romances”; however, these are not the escapist
	fictions this word often implies, but fictions that
	range freely among very unusual or intense human
	experiences. Melville portrayed such experiences
	because he believed these best enabled him to
(30)	explore moral questions, an exploration he assumed
	was the ultimate purpose of fiction. He was content
	to sacrifice continuity or even credibility as long
	as he could establish a significant moral situation.
	Thus Melville’s romances do not give the reader
(35)	a full understanding of the complete feelings and
	thoughts that motivate actions and events that shape
	fate. Rather, the romances leave unexplained the
	sequence of events and either simplify or obscure
	motives. Again, such simplifications and obscurities
(40)	exist in order to give prominence to the depiction of
	sharply delineated moral values, values derived from
	a character’s purely personal sense of honor, rather
	than, as in a Jamesian novel, from the conventions of
	society.

    In most earthquakes the Earth's crust cracks like porcelain, Stress builds up until a fracture forms at a line depth of a few kilometers and the crust slips to relieve the stress. Some earthquakes, however, take place hun dreds of kilometers down in the Earth's mantle, where high pressure makes rock so ductile that it flows instead of cracking, even under stress severe enough to deform it like putty. How can there be earthquakes at such depths?

    That such deep events do occur has been accepted only since 1927. when the seismologist Kiyoo Wadati convincingly demonstrated their existence. Instead of comparing the arrival times of seismic waves at different locations, as earlier researchers had done, Wadati relied on a time difference between the arrival of primary(P) waves and the slower secondary(S) waves. Because P and S waves travel at different but fairly constant speeds, the interval between their arrivals increases in proportion to the distance from the earthquake focus, or initial rupture point.

    For most earthquakes, wadati discovered, the interval was quite short near the epicenter; the point on the surface where shaking is strongest. For a few events, however, the delay was long even at the epicenter. Wadati saw a similar pattern when he analyzed data on the intensity of shaking. Most earthquakes had a small area of intense shaking, which weakened rapidly with increasing distance from the epicenter. but others were characterized by a lower peak intensity, felt over a broader area. Both the P-S intervals and the intensity patterns suggested two kinds of earthquakes: the more common shallow events, in which the focus lay just under the epicenter, and deep events, with a focus several hundred kilometers down.

    The question remained: how can such quakes occur, given that mantle rock at a depth of more than 50 kilometers is too ductile to store enough stress to fracture? Wadati's work suggested that deep events occur in areas (now called Wadati-Benioff zones) where one crustal plate is forced under another and descends into the mantle. The descending rock is substantially cooler than the surrounding mantle and(60) hence is less ductile and much more liable to fracture.

    In mid-February 1917 a women's movement independent of political affiliation erupted in Line New York City, the stronghold of the Socialist party in the United states. Protesting against the high cost of living, thousands of women refused to buy chickens, fish, and vegetables. The boycott shut down much of the City's foodstuffs marketing for two weeks, riveting public attention on the issue of food prices, which had increased partly as a result of increased exports of food to Europe that had been occurring since the outbreak of the First World War.

    By early 1917 the Socialist party had established itself as a major political presence in New York City. New York Socialists, whose customary spheres of struggle were electoral work and trade union organizing, seized the opportunity and quickly organized an extensive series of cost-of-living protests designed to direct the women's movement toward Socialist goals. Underneath the Socialists' brief commitment to cost-of-living organizing lay a basic indifference to the issue itself. While some Socialists did view price protests as a direct step toward socialism, most Socialists ultimately sought to divert the cost-of-living movement into alternative channels of protest. Union organizing, they argued, was the best method through which to combat the high cost of living. For others, cost-of-living or oganizing was valuable insofar as it led women into the struggle for suffrage, and similarly, the suffrage struggle was valuable insofar as it moved United States society one step closer to socialism.

    Although New York's Socialists saw the cost-of-living issue as, at best ,secondary or tertiary to the real task at hand, the boycotters, by sharp contrast, joined the price protest movement out of an urgent and deeply felt commitment to the cost-of-living issue. A shared experience of swiftly declining living standards caused by rising food prices drove these women to protest. Consumer organizing spoke directly to their daily lives and concerns; they saw cheaper food as a valuable end in itself. Food price protests were these women's way of organizing at their own workplace, as workers whose occupation was shopping and preparing food for their families.