VOL. LXXIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 37Q 



tants of the towns were buried either alive or dead under the ruins of their 

 houses in an ii^tant. The town of Polistene was large, but ill situated between 

 two rivers, subject to overflow. 2100 out of about 6000 lost their lives here 

 the fatal 5th of February. There was a nunnery at Polistene ; being curious to 

 see the nuns that had escaped, I asked the marquis, the baron of this country, 

 to show me their barracks ; but it seems only 1 out of 23 had been dugout of her 

 cell alive, and she was fourscore years of age. What causes a confusion in all 

 the accounts of the phenomena produced by this earthquake in the plain, is the 

 not having sufficiently explained the nature of the soil and situation. They tell 

 you, that a town has been thrown a mile from the place where it stood without 

 mentioning a word of a ravine ; that woods and corn-fields had been removed in 

 the same manner,' when in truth it is only on a large scale, what we see every 

 day on a smaller, when pieces of the sides of hollow ways, having been under- 

 mined by rain waters, are detached into the bottom by their own weight. Here, 

 from the great depth of the ravine, and the violent motion of the earth, two 

 huge portions of the earth, on which a great part of the town stood, consisting of 

 some hundreds of houses, were detached into the ravine, and nearly across it, 

 about half a mile from the place where they stood ; and what is most extraordi- 

 nary, several of the inhabitants of those houses, who had taken this singular 

 leap in them, were yet dug out alive, and some unhurt. I spoke to one myself 

 who had taken this extraordinary journey in his house, with his wife and a maid- 

 servant : neither he nor his maid-servant were hurt ; but he told me, his wife 

 had been a little hurt, but was now nearly recovered. I happened to ask him, 

 what hurt his wife had received ? His answer, though of a very serious nature, 

 was ludicrous enough. He said, she had both her legs and one arm broken, 

 and that she had a fracture on her skull so that the brain was visible. It appears 

 to me, that the Calabresi have more firmness than the Neapolitans ; and they 

 really seem to bear their excessive present misfortune with a true philosophic pati- 

 ence. Of 1600 inhabitants at Terra Nuova, only 400 escaped alive. In other 

 parts of the plain situated near the ravine, and near the town of Terra 

 Nuova, I saw many acres of land with trees and corn fields that had been 

 detached into the ravine, and often without having been overturned, so 

 that the trees and crops were growing as well as if they had been planted there. 

 Other such pieces were lying in the bottom, in an inclined situation; and others 

 again that had been quite overturned. In one place, two of these immense 

 pieces of land having been detached opposite to each other, had filled the valley, 

 and stopped the course of the river, the waters of which were forming a great 

 lake : and this is the true state of what the accounts mention of mountains that 

 had walked, and joined together, stopping the course of the river, and forming 

 a lake. At the moment of the earthquake the river disappeared, as at Rosarno, 

 and returning soon after, overflowed the bottom of the ravine about three feet 



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