OF VOLCANOS. 223 



panied this eruption : at the same moment when the explo- 

 sion took place, on the 30th of April, 1811, a loud 

 subterranean noise was heard in South America, which 

 spread terror and dismay over a district of 2200 (German) 

 geographical square miles (35200 English geographical 

 square miles). The dwellers on the banks of the Apure 

 near the confluence of the Bio Nula, and the most distant 

 inhabitants of the sea coast of Venezuela, alike compared 

 the sound to that of the discharge of great pieces of ord- 

 nance. Now from the confluence of the Nula with the 

 Apure (by which latter river I arrived on the Orinoco) to 

 the volcano of St. Yincent is a distance in a straight line of 

 628 English geographical miles. The sound, which cer- 

 tainly was not propagated through the air, must have 

 proceeded from a deep-seated subterranean cause ; for its 

 intensity was scarcely greater on the sea coast nearest to the 

 volcano where the eruption was taking place, than in the 

 interior of the country, in the basin of the Apure and the 

 Orinoco. 



It would be unnecessary to multiply examples by citing 

 other instances which I have collected, but, to recall a phe- 

 nomenon of European historical importance, I will only 

 farther mention the celebrated earthquake of Lisbon. 

 Simultaneously with that event, on the 1st of November, 

 1755, not only were the Swiss lakes and the sea near the 

 coast of Sweden violently agitated, but even among the 

 eastern West Indian Islands, Martinique, Antigua, and 

 Barbadoes, where the tide never exceeds thirty inches, the 

 sea suddenly rose more than twenty feet. All these pheno- 



