THE EARTH. 135 



But not rocks alone, but whole mountains are, 

 by various causes, disunited from each other. 

 We see in many parts of the Alps amazing clefts, 

 the sides of which so exactly correspond with the 

 opposite, that no doubt can be made of their hav- 

 ing been once joined together. At Cajeta,* in 

 Italy, a mountain was split in this manner by an 

 earthquake ; and there is a passage opened through 

 it, that appears as if elaborately done by the in- 

 dustry of man. In the Andes these breaches are 

 frequently seen. That at Thermopylae, in Greece, 

 has been long famous. The mountain of the Tro- 

 glodytes, in Arabia, has thus a passage through 

 it ; and that in Savoy, which nature began, and 

 which Victor Amadeus completed, is an instance 

 of the same kind. 



We have accounts of some of these disruptions 

 immediately after their happening. ** In the 

 month of June,t in the year 1714, a part of the 

 mountain of Diableret, in the district of Valais 

 in France, suddenly fell down, between two and 

 three o'clock in the afternoon, the weather being- 

 very calm and serene. It was of a conical figure, 

 and destroyed fifty*five cottages in the fall. Fif- 

 teen persons, together with about a hundred 

 beasts, were also crushed beneath its ruins, which 

 covered an extent of a good league square. The 

 dust it occasioned instantly covered all the neigh- 

 bourhood in darkness. The heaps of rubbish 

 were more than three hundred feet high. They 

 stopped the current of a river that ran along the 



* Button, vol. ii. p. 364. 



t Hist de 1' Academic des Sciences, p. 4. an. 1715. 



