62 . REPORT—1850. 
themselves. The distinction is most important to the clear conception of 
both. While to the former is reserved the mighty task of perpetually yet so 
gradually (as on the whole not to interfere with the inhabitants of our globe) 
lifting fresh land from beneath the ocean bed and dropping others below its 
waves, so that the earth, which has already “ waxed old as doth a garment,” 
shall be renewed again and “changed like a vesture,” and its fitness for the 
support of man and animals ever preserved, the geologist becomes convinced 
that as the volcano is itself but insignificant in all its results taken by them- 
selves, when compared with the totality of the mighty cosmical law of which 
it is at once the superficial index, and also the most striking evidence; so the 
earthquake, great and formidable as are its effects upon man and upon his 
works, is as nothing when compared with the enormous forces in whose throes 
it receives its birth. 
Yet as in our estimations of the united effects through time of the sum 
of all the forces acting upon the surface of our planet, we are compelled to take 
large account of those directly due to volcanic foci, active and extinct, so 
the secondary phenomena that we have pointed out and endeavoured to 
systematize, produced by the transient yet violent passage. of the earthquake 
shock, cannot be neglected in their continual and reiterated effects upon our 
earth, but should form an element in all our attempts to estimate and explain 
the past revolutions of its surface. 
So far as our knowledge yet enables us to judge, the office of earthquakes, 
the general resultant geological effect of their secondary action, is not one of 
elevation but of depression, of degradation and of leveling, although always 
probably preceded and accompanied by the proper forces of elevation to whose 
action it is referable. 
Perhaps the most remarkable of the secondary effects of earthquakes to a 
remotely future supposable posterity, may be the prodigious mass of organic 
remains of men and animals mingled with many of the least perishable of 
man’s works which will be found entombed in our existing, most recent, or 
at least most superficial formations, when these may have become depressed, 
heated, consolidated and altered in texture and re-elevated to become the 
pleistocenes of future races of mankind. To estimate thenmumbers of men 
only that have perished by earthquakes within the period of history is im- 
. possible; thousands have repeatedly been in a few moments entombed ; 
60,000 persons at Lisbon, 10,000 at Morocco, 40,000 in Calabria, 50,000 in 
Syria, and probably 120,000 in the same country in the time of Tiberius and 
Justin Elder, a.p. 19 and 526. 
In the reign of Justinian earthquakes shook the whole Roman world re- 
peatedly ; Constantinople shook for forty days; an impulsive and vibratory 
motion was felt, enormous chasms opened, huge and heavy bodies were dis- “ 
charged into the air, and the sea advanced and retreated beyond its usual 
margins; a part of Libanus was thrown into the sea and became a mole for 
Botrys in Pheenicia, At Antioch 250,000 persons perished, May 20, Α.}. 
526, and at Berytus all the students. of civil law there collected, July, a.p. 
551. (See Procopius, Agathias, and Theophanes, as quoted by Gibbon.) 
On the 2lst of July 365, in the second year of Valentinian, a fearful 
earthquake shook almost the whole Roman world; and the retreat and sub- 
sequent rolling in of the great sea-wave of the Mediterranean is described 
as tremendous, sweeping two miles inland and carrying ships over the tops 
of houses, so that at Alexandria 50,000 persons lost their lives. (See Liba- 
nius, Sozomen, Cedrenus and others, as quoted by Gibbon.) In the earth- 
quake of Messina, 1692, 74,000 persons are said to have perished, some 
accounts raising thenumber to 100,000 (Practical Reflections on Earthquakes, 
