378 STRUCTURE, AND MODE OF ACTION 



three centuries. The Peloponnesus has, between Epidaurus and 

 Trcezene, near Methone, a Monte Nuovo described by Strabo and 

 seen again by Dodwell, which is higher than the Monte Nuovo of 

 the Phlegraaan Field near Baiae, and perhaps even higher than the 

 new volcano of Jorullo in the plains of Mexico, which I found sur- 

 rounded by several thousand small basaltic cones, which had been 

 protruded from the earth, and were still smoking. In the Mediter- 

 ranean and its shores, it is not only from the permanent craters of 

 isolated mountains having a constant communication with the in- 

 terior, as Stromboli, Vesuvius, and Etna, that volcanic fires break 

 forth : at Ischia, on the Monte Epomeo, and also, as it would appear 

 by the accounts of the ancients, in the Lelantine plain near Chalcis, 

 lavas have flowed from fissures which have suddenly opened at the 

 surface of the earth. Besides these phenomena which fall within 

 the historic period, or within the "restricted domain of well-assured 

 tradition, and which Carl Hitter will collect and elucidate in his mas- 

 terly work on Geography the shores of the Mediterranean exhibit 

 numerous remains of more ancient volcanic action. In the south 

 part of France, in Auvergne, we see a separate, complete system of 

 volcanos arranged in lines, trachytic domes alternating with cones of 

 eruption, from which streams of lava have flowed in narrow bands. 

 The plain of Lombardy, as level as the surface of the sea, and form- 

 ing an inner Gulf of the Adriatic, surrounds the trachyte of the 

 Euganean Hills, where rise domes of granular trachyte, obsidian, 

 and pearl-stone, masses connected by a common origin, which break 

 through the lower cretaceous rock and nummulitic limestone, but 

 have never flowed in narrow streams. Similar evidences of ancient 

 revolutions of nature are found in several parts of the mainland of 

 Greece and in Asia Minor, countries which will one day offer a rich 

 field for geological investigation, when intellectual light shall revisit 

 the seats from which it has radiated to the Western world, and when 

 oppressed humanity shall no longer be subject to the barbarism of 

 Turkish rule. 



I recall the geographical proximity of these various phenomena, 

 in 'order to show that the basin of the Mediterranean, with its series 

 of islands, might have offered to an attentive observer much that has 

 been recently discovered, under various forms, in South America, 



