OUTBURST OF COSIGUINA. 103 



the wind as far as Jamaica, where it fell in various 

 places on the 24th and 25th of January; and an 

 English vessel fell in with a great quantity of 

 floating pumice out at sea, at a distance of eight 

 hundred miles from the volcano. The outburst 

 was accompanied by an earthquake, which was felt 

 over the whole isthmus. So mighty was the roar, 

 that it was heard not only in the towns of Guate- 

 mala, St. Salvador, Leon, and at Balize, on 

 the eastern coast, in the Bay of Honduras, but, 

 by the sound travelling through the solid earth, 

 even at Kingston in Jamaica, at Carthagena, 

 and Santa Marta, in New Granada, and at 

 Santa Fe de Bogota, although the latter town 

 lies a thousand miles from Cosiguina. At several 

 of these places, to which the trembling of the earth 

 did not reach, people thought they heard discharges 

 of cannon. "To get a good notion," remarks 

 Berghaus, u of what the awful thunders of the 

 mountain during its outburst must have been, you 

 must fancy the noise of Vesuvius, which in fact 

 is not perceived farther off than Gaeta, being heard 

 at once in Lisbon, Liverpool, Gothenburg, 

 Riga, and at the foot of the Caucasus." 



If we consider the enormous quantities of earth 

 which are heaved up and thrown out by volcanic out- 

 bursts — masses which cannot fall back again into 

 the depths within ; if we remember that actions of 

 this kind have been witnessed for thousands of 



