140 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



other island?, within these few years, have heen visited by 

 earthquakes of the most calamitous violence. Through the 

 Cyclades there came, in remote antiquity, a sea wave, raised up 

 by some volcanic convulsion, which desolated Greece, and is 

 recorded as one of the deluges ; while other percm 

 opened the passage already mentioned, for lowering the surface 

 of the Euxine into the Propontis, and thence to the Egean ; an 

 event commemorated in Samothrace, when that island most 

 1 lively was separated from the main coast.* It was then 

 the Cimmerian Chersonesus, from a rocky island, became a 

 great peninsula, and Phanagoria of the Moeotis began to 

 exhibit the cones of deposit from which mud is ejected to the 

 present time. The Euxine, Caspian, and Mediterranean, have 

 shoal water and islands almost exclusively on the north, and. 

 the deepest sea on the south ; but the Euxine alone witnesses 

 percussions, which still continue to elevate the highlands of 

 the Crimea. From the year of the death of Mithridates to the 

 present period, many severe earthquakes have shaken the 

 promontories of the coast, and caused destructive avalanches. 

 At Sevastopol, the ancient Sinus Portuosus of Mela, iron rings, 

 originally fixed in the rocks, probably by the Genoese, to 

 secure vessels, in natural docks, close to the shore, are now 

 risen so high above ground as to be no longer available for 

 that purpose ; and, in the autumn of 1S44, a sudden heaving 

 of a volcanic disturbance caused the sea to recede from the 

 whole line of the northern coast, leaving all the vessels then 

 close in shore stranded. 



In the Caspian, Baku, like Derbent, had its walls partly 

 thrown down by the sea, in 17S4; yet now it stands a quarter 



* The effects of this sea wave are clearly marked on the east coast of 

 Attica and Peloponnesus. It hroke across the isthmus, and left marks 

 of its violence in the Saronic and Corinthian gulfs. Traditional recollec- 

 tions of these enormous catastrophes are depicted in the language- of St. 

 John — "And every island fled away, and the mountains were not 

 found." Rev. xvi. 20. Patmos was in the direct line of this convulsion. 



