374 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 



must not imagine that the fury of war is more conducive than the peaceful spirit of 

 commercial enterprise to the accumulation of wrecked vessels in the bed of the sea. 

 From an examination of Lloyd's lists, from the year 1793 to the commencement of 1829, 

 it has appeared that the number of British vessels alone lost during that period amounted 

 on an average to no less than one and a half daily, a greater number than we should 

 have anticipated, although we learn from Moreau's tables that the number of merchant 

 vessels employed at one time in the navigation of England and Scotland, amounts to 

 about twenty thousand, having one with another a mean burden of one hundred and 

 twenty tons. Out of five hundred and fifty-one ships of the royal navy lost to the 

 country during the period above mentioned, only one hundred and sixty were taken or 

 destroyed by the enemy, the rest having either stranded or foundered, or having been 

 burnt by accident, a striking proof that the dangers of our naval warfare, however great, 

 may be far exceeded by the storm, the hurricane, the shoal, and all the other perils of the 

 deep. Millions of dollars and other coins have been sometimes submerged in a single 

 ship, and on these, when they happen to be enveloped in a matrix capable of protecting 

 them from chemical changes, much information of historical interest will remain 

 inscribed, and endure for periods as indefinite, as have the delicate markings of zoophytes 

 or lapidified plants in some of the ancient secondary rocks. In almost every large ship, 

 moreover, there are some precious stones set in seals, and other articles of use or orna 

 ment composed of the hardest substances in nature, on which letters and various images 

 are carved engravings which they may retain when included in subaqueous strata, as 

 long as a crystal preserves its natural form." This interesting statement of Mr. Lyell 

 shows, that, independent of the remains of plants and animals washed down by rivers 

 from the land into the ocean, a vast variety of substances, diverse in kind and form, must 

 necessarily be included in the strata now building up below its waters ; and reflecting 

 upon the action of that power, which, at different epochs, has upheaved our mountain 

 ranges, we may conceive of the singular spectacle that would be presented to the in 

 quirer long ages hence, and of its close resemblance to that exhibited by the stratified 

 rocks upon which we gaze, should an elevating cause raise up the " ooze and bottom of 

 the deep," submerging the existing continents in compensation. 



In referring to the elevation of the oceanic bed, we are not indulging in any extrava 

 gant speculation, for, besides a gradual change as the effect of deposition, a series of well- 

 attested facts proclaim the occurrence of violent catastrophes. The sudden formation of 

 new islands, the result of submarine volcanic action, constitute a distinct class of those 

 mutations to which the oceanic realm is subject. Some of these islands, after a hasty 

 start into existence, have subsided, and either entirely disappeared, or become shoals 

 slightly depressed below the level of the water, while others have remained permanent. 

 Some also have consisted merely of volcanic matter, while others have presented marine 

 strata, and been literally the upheaved floor of the sea. 



The gulf of Santorin, one of the Cyclades, in the Grecian Archipelago, nearly encloses 

 several small islands which have emerged from the deep within the period of authentic 

 history. Rather more than a century before the Christian era, the small isle of Palaia 

 Kameni was thrown up in the gulf. In the year 1573 another appeared, called the Little 

 Kameni, a large disengagement of vapour and the discharge of pumice accompanying its 

 elevation, and telling the story of its birth. A third was formed in the years 1707 and 

 1709, called the New Kameni, which still exhales sulphureous vapours. These islands 

 consist of volcanic products, lava, scoriae, and pumice, and of strata uplifted by the ex 

 pansive force which produced the ejection of these materials. 



Similar instances have repeatedly happened in connection with the Azores. The first 

 on record is that mentioned by Kircher in 1538 ; another took place in 1720; and a 



