284 Mr Forbes's Pkyskal Notices of the Bay of Naples. 



the time. Pini, who has enlarged most on the objection, 

 dwells absurdly on the internal force requisite to raise so vast 

 a temple, and on the improbability that the whole area of it 

 should be elevated in a state of parallelism ; but he wholly 

 overlooks the prodigious scale on which earthquakes usually 

 act, not elevating planes of a few yards, but of whole square 

 leagues, and the damage usually done being, from some ac- 

 companying vibrations in the soil, which shake buildings to 

 fragments, and often with a rotatory motion ; but in a simple 

 act of volcanic elevation, where the motive power had an exit 

 at so short a distance as the Monte Nuovo, (in one case,) and 

 where the building in question was not a house with unen- 

 cumbered walls, which might be shaken in pieces like those 

 of Pozzuoli, but a ruin closely imbedded in a volcanic tufa, 

 they could not possibly have been overturned till that soil was 

 artificially removed, and then could only have fallen from a 

 want of verticality, which, if we consider the theory of the 

 case, must necessarily be so small, wherever the mass of land 

 elevated is large, and the rise only of a few feet, as to have no 

 sensible effect in the devastation committed by earthquakes. 

 Besides dismissing all arguments of probabilities, it is only 

 necessary to recollect, that the very author who has produced 

 this as the sole objection to our theory has been compelled, as 

 we have already seen, in another part of the same paper, to 

 employ the self-same agent to account for the depression of 

 the temple below high-water mark. 



2. A more refined objection has been urged from the exist- 

 ence of the spring of medicinal water, probably in the very 

 spot where it was found by the builders of the temple, which 

 might probably have been dried up or led into a new channel 

 by tlie effects of an earthquake.* This is mere hypothesis ; 

 and in that ignorance in which we must ever remain of the 

 particular effects which powerful subterranean agents may pro- 

 duce, we dare only argue by analogy ; and here again it is in 

 our favour. We have seen that the change of level extended 

 over the shores of this bay ; yet still the hot spring in the 

 baths of Nero, which are considerably nearer the Monte Nu- 

 ovo than is the Temple of Serapis, continues to flow in the 



* Daubeny on Volcanos, p. 161, &c. 

 3 



