76 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



at the extremity of the Bosphorus, where the Cyanean 

 craters are submerged, a recent lava formation, parti- 

 cularly 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 Tiberias, 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 to Syria and 

 Palestine, producing, in the valley of Jordan, the cele- 

 brated 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 measurements of this depression 

 of the soil is as yet rigidly determined, because the in- 

 struments employed for the purpose, the mercury 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 cal- 

 culations, 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* 



