1907.] 



AND CONTRACTION OF THE EARTH. 271 



The mountains north of Delphi, including Parnassus and Heli- 

 con, as well as those further west in ^tolia, like those to the south 

 in Arcadia, have all been pushed up by the expulsion of lava from 

 beneath the gulf of Corinth. Now the accounts of the destruction 

 of Helike show that the region was first terribly shaken by an 

 earthquake, obviously by the movement of lava streams beneath 

 the crust, what Plato would perhaps call Pyriphlegethon, and then 

 inundated by the sea, the town afterwards remaining largely or 

 wholly under water. This can only mean that the bottom of the 

 gulf gave down, and carried the southern shore down with it; 

 perhaps the fault which moved is beneath the deep soil and did not 

 show at the surface, except in the chasms which appeared at Bura, 

 as mentioned by Aristotle. If alluvium of such great age could 

 settle at all under the shaking of an earthquake, the amount of the 

 subsidence could not exceed a very few feet. This was found to 

 be true of the soft land at San Francisco which had been made 

 within a quarter of a century before the great earthquake of April 

 18, 1906, and the same conclusion is drawn from observations of 

 many other great earthquakes of recent years. Such shaking down 

 would not be adequate to account for the submergence of Helike 

 beneath the waves. 



This town could hardly have been less than 50 feet above 

 the sea level of the gulf, and a height of 80 feet is much more 

 probable, owing to the universal custom of the Greeks of building 

 a town always on the highest available point and crowning it with 

 an Acropolis, containing the temples of the gods. The houses would 

 be at least 20 feet high, so that the subsidence must have been at 

 least 70 feet, and it was more probably from 80 to 100 feet. The 

 amount of the subsidence, even if we take the lowest figure, 70 

 feet, is altogether too great to be accounted for by mere shaking 

 down of alluvium deposited hundreds of thousands of years ago. 

 And the distance from the sea mentioned by Strabo, who could 

 not well be mistaken, shows that a sliding of the whole broad al- 

 luvial deposit could not have taken place. 



Moreover, the account given by Aristotle, within whose life- 

 time the event had occurred, implies that the seismic sea wave was 

 of that class in which the water first retires from the shore (irpowaL^) 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC. , XLVI. 1 86 S, PRINTED SEPTEMBER 4, I907. 



