IGNEOUS CAUSES OF CHANGE. 257 



CHAPTER VIII. 

 Earthquakes. 



" Of chance or change, oh! let not man complain ; 

 Else shall he never, never, cease to wail ; 

 For from the imperial dome, to where the swain 

 Rears his lone cottage in the silent dale, 

 All feel the assault of fortune's fickle gale. 

 Art, empire, earth itself, are doom'd ; 

 Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vale; 

 And gulfs the mountains' mighty mass entomb'd; 

 And where the Atlantic rolls, wide continents have bloom'd." 



Beattie. 



IN the present chapter we shall briefly describe some of those 

 remarkable convulsions which from time to time have caused the 

 crust of the earth to heave like the waves of the ocean, and to 

 gape open in many places, suddenly engulphing cities and their 

 inhabitants, or deluging whole tracts of country by the upheaved 

 waters. These phenomena, which are supposed to be caused by 

 immense evolutions of steam, and other vapors, or gasses, under 

 an intense pressure, which is only relieved by a volcanic erup- 

 tion, or an opening of the earth, constitute the most terrible warn- 

 ings, which reminds us of the instability of all things. The evi- 

 dences of mighty change which the philosopher sees in each up- 

 heaved hill of granite, and dike of trap, or in the formation of 

 contorted strata may read to him a lesson, which, if rightly un- 

 derstood, will teach him to look far from his present abode, for 

 the unchangable world; but the careless observer, who builds his 

 cottage on the side of a volcanic cone, and feeds his flocks with- 

 in its crater, needs the awful sound of subterranean thunder, and 

 the rocking of the plain, to convince him that the neglected tra- 

 ditions of former calamities, were not all a fiction. 



