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the following year it sunk into the ocean. In 

 the sixteenth century the Lucrine Lake near 

 Naples disappeared, and Monte Nuovo, a vol- 

 canic hill six hundred feet high, and four miles 

 in circumference, rose out of the place it had 

 occupied. 



(t Perhaps the most wonderful example I can 

 give you of volcanic action, is the elevation of 

 Mount Jorullo, near the city of Mexico, in 1759. 

 Alarming sounds and repeated earthquakes, 

 which continued for three months, had prepared 

 the inhabitants for some dreadful convulsion ; 

 when at length a tract of ground, from three to 

 four miles in extent, swelled up in the shape of 

 a bladder to the height of 500 feet. The ter- 

 rified natives, who witnessed this extraordinary 

 scene from the neighbouring mountains, asserted 

 that flames burst from the ground ; that red-hot 

 rocks were thrown to a prodigious height ; and 

 that the surface of the earth was seen to heave 

 like an agitated sea. The surrounding district is 

 covered by hundreds of small cones called hor- 

 nitos, or ovens, by the inhabitants ; they are 

 about ten feet high, and from each a thick smoke 

 ascends. From among these ovens six large 

 masses arose from the plain, some of them up- 

 wards of 1200 feet ; and the volcano of Jorullo, 

 which has never ceased to burn, is now 1700 

 feet high. The place where this extraordinary 

 convulsion took place was forty leagues from 



