volcanic pits, crevices emitting sulphurous vapors, till we reach the kingdom and sea of the two Sicilies, where a vast concentration of volcanic fire permanently discharges from below smoke, gaseous vapors, flames, and lavas, by the craters of Ætna, Vesuvius, and Stromboli. Thucydides, Seneca, Strabo, Pausanias, Pliny, and others, mention numerous earthquakes in Italy, where mountains were split, cities were overturned, and volcanic islands rose and again subsided. Since the Vesuvian eruption, recorded by Pliny the Younger, no calamity more appalling appears on record than that which took place in 1538, when, in a few hours, Monte Nuovo, a flaming mountain of four miles in circumference, rose out of the earth, destroying the village of Tripergola, obliterating the Lucrine Lake, and caused the ruin of the country to six miles around it; unless one greater still occurred, when Messina in Sicily, and many towns of Calabria, were destroyed in 1786.

No author states at what period, and to what extent, volcanic convulsion changed the surface of Eastern Italy, and separated Calabria from Sicily, by a disrupture now denominated the Straits of Messina. The event can only be surmised by approximation; for, although the catastrophe confessedly took place before written historical record, it was not so remote as to have obliterated the terror impressed upon the memories of subsequent generations living in the vicinity, or to have worn away the dangerous impediments of Scylla and Charybdis, which intervened at the most adjacent point for crossing from one coast to the other, and probably not long before the foundations of Zancle (now Messina) were laid. The event may synchronize with the close of that transition era of convulsive phenomena which includes the bursting of the Thracian Bosphorus at the volcanic Cyanean islands; the Greek deluges; the separation of Euboea from Attica; and the passage of a large diluvian wave across the isthmus of Corinth, which has left indelible marks on all the coasts in the vicinity,

and was particularly recorded at Dodona.* They were the necessary precursors of the first swarming of the tribes that came down the Hellespont, and commenced the heroic age of Greece and Italy.

In the Adriatic, at the summit of the gulf, we find Adria, or Hadria, said to have been built on the sea-shore, by Tarchon, leader of the antique Etruscan people, about the time of the Trojan war. The present town, standing upon the rubbish of two others, is now fifteen and a half miles distant from the nearest mouth of the river Tartarus, which is still six miles within the farthest point of land projecting in the sea. It is only of late years that, in making excavations at the depth of several feet below the present surface of the town, a former level was found, with numerous fragments of Etruscan and Roman pottery; and, at a still greater depth, a second floor, where all the earthen-ware fragments proved to be Etruscan alone, and there were vestiges of a theatre! In these facts, both the raising of the soil and progress of alluvial deposits are demonstrated in waters but little disturbed by marine currents, and during a space of 3000 years.

THE EGEAN.

In the Egean, volcanic disturbances have been and still are exceedingly numerous and destructive. From the remotest periods recorded, islands have risen up from the sea; such as volcanic Delos, overhung with vapors to the present time; or torn from the continent of Asia, like Samos, with its ancient organic remains of Neiades, and craters, one of which commenced latterly to furnish a rivulet running to the sea; and

* Scholiast upon the 16th Iliad, v. 233, quoting Thrasybulus, an ancient author, and other comments.

+ Now Po di Levante, and most likely the oldest bed of the Padus or Po? The lowest stratum of ruins was at the depth of more than twenty feet.

other islands, within these few years, have been visited by earthquakes of the most calamitous violence. Through the Cyclades there came, in remote antiquity, a sea wave, raised up by some volcanic convulsion, which desolated Greece, and is recorded as one of the deluges; while other percussions opened the passage already mentioned, for lowering the surface of the Euxine into the Propontis, and thence to the Egean; an event commemorated in Samothrace, when that island most likely was separated from the main coast.* It was then the Cimmerian Chersonesus, from a rocky island, became a great peninsula, and Phanagoria of the Maotis began to exhibit the cones of deposit from which mud is ejected to the present time. The Euxine, Caspian, and Mediterranean, have shoal water and islands almost exclusively on the north, and the deepest sea on the south; but the Euxine alone witnesses percussions, which still continue to elevate the highlands of the Crimea. From the year of the death of Mithridates to the present period, many severe earthquakes have shaken the promontories of the coast, and caused destructive avalanches. At Sevastopol, the ancient Sinus Portuosus of Mela, iron rings, originally fixed in the rocks, probably by the Genoese, to secure vessels, in natural docks, close to the shore, are now risen so high above ground as to be no longer available for that purpose; and, in the autumn of 1844, a sudden heaving of a volcanic disturbance caused the sea to recede from the whole line of the northern coast, leaving all the vessels then close in shore stranded.

In the Caspian, Baku, like Derbent, had its walls partly thrown down by the sea, in 1784; yet now it stands a quarter

* The effects of this sea wave are clearly marked on the east coast of Attica and Peloponnesus. It broke across the isthmus, and left marks of its violence in the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs. Traditional recollections of these enormous catastrophes are depicted in the language of St. John "And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found." Rev. xvi. 20. Patmos was in the direct line of this convulsion.

of a mile from the water's edge. The level varies occasionally six or seven feet; and small volcanic cones still break forth on its shores. In the lake, or rather bay of Ensili, three new islands have appeared since 1811, already showing several willows upon them; and the back water of the Gemishawas is become fordable, though, until recently, it was not to be traversed, the river waters having sensibly diminished. The Caspian is the Deryah Kolsum of the Arabs, because it is covered. with a mist ever hanging on the water.

ASIA MINOR.

ASIA MINOR appears subjected to the action of at least two subterranean volcanic galleries, which, in connection with the Italian system of ignitions, passing beneath the Egean, are the agents of convulsion in that sea; and in Greece and Thessaly, produce those mephitic localities, inflammable rivers, and gaseous exhalations, which were used in mythological doctrines and in the prophetic impositions of the Delphic oracle.

Others, of at least equal antiquity, existed on the Asiatic side; and although no conspicuous volcanic crater is pointed out in the peninsula, excepting at the present Dopos Kalesi, and at Koolah in Catacecaumene, where the lava district reveals volcanic agency, apparently not long dormant. There is, also, at the extremity of the Bosphorus, where the Cyanean craters are submerged, a recent lava formation, particularly conspicuous on the Asiatic shore.

No region has been more constantly disturbed by earthquakes than this high peninsula, from the earliest period to the present; but perhaps most so during the Roman sway, when, in the reign of Tiberius, fourteen, and in that of Julian not less than one hundred and fifty cities were destroyed in one convulsion.

BASIN OF THE DEAD SEA.

THESE Convulsions of the surface are external signs of the gallery that passes westward; but there is a second, which turns from beneath Taurus, south of Syria and Palestine, producing, in the valley of Jordan, the celebrated Dead Sea, or Asphaltic Lake, regarded as the deepest basin, beneath the level of the sea, in the known world, the surface of the water being far below that of the Caspian. No exact measurement of this depression of the soil is, as yet, rigidly determined, because the instruments employed for the purpose, the mer

cury rising to the summit of the tube, - have always failed, by the excess of their indications, to offer a trustworthy basis for calculation. Russeger, the last scientific traveller, being similarly disappointed, gives, from other calculations, the surface of the lake, at the mouth of the Jordan, as 1319 French feet below the Mediterranean; Jerusalem, by measurement, as 2479 feet above it; and yet no traveller remarks, that if these statements be nearly correct, the ridge behind, or west of Jerusalem, being in sight from the lake, would be more that 4000 English feet higher and loftier than any mountain in Great Britain; * nor is there any notice taken of the levels of the lake, as compared with the Gulf of Akkaba, - which is nearly on the same level as the Mediterranean, and the elevation of the ridge which parts the Dead Sea from Wady Moosa. Already, before the era of Abraham, it is evident, by the notice of slime pits (naphtha) in the plain of Gomorrah, that volcanic action was kindled; and when the surface subsided into the Asphal

* According to measurements of British naval officers, taken after the capture of Acre, in 1839, it appears - by lines of altitude, carried from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, &c.— that the Lake of Tiberias was 84 English feet below the Mediterranean; the Arabah al Kadesh 91 feet; the Dead Sea, 1337; whence it is plain no region of equal extent, on the earth, presents phenomena of such great difference; for the culminating point of Libanus rises, at Mount Hermon, to 10,000 feet.