17 
been strangely torn and rent. The rivers from these 
mountains ceased to flow for twenty-four hours, and 
when the damned-up floods found a course to the 
sea they brought down thousand tons of timber, that 
floated about in the ocean, grouped like so many 
islands. So rapid and resistless had the trees rush- 
ed down in their course that they were in general 
parkless and branchless. It is particularly remark- 
ed in these narratives, as in that of so many earth- 
quakes that dead fish were taken up in great num- - 
bers on the coast after the shocks. The correspon- 
dents of Sir Hans Sloane, who collected with care 
the accounts of eye-witnesses of the catastrophe, re- 
. fer constantly to subsidences, as if there was a pre- 
vailing supposition that the whele island had sunk 
considerably. 
Looking at Sir Charles Lyell’s delineations of the 
fissures and chasms left after the earthquake of 
Calabria in 1783, we may explain many peculiari- 
_ties, not so much of our mountain gullies and ravines 
as of the guilies that occur in our plains. They 
seem to commence in no confluent water-shed.— 
They cut their channels through the argillaceous 
strata, with vertical cliffs, and cannot be accounted 
for in the course they take by the declivity of the 
plain, or by the quantity of rain they drain from 
the surface. The early maps of Saint Catherine’s 
show that there have occurred deviations in the 
course of the Rio Cobre, that are not easily to be . 
reconciled by abundant rains. Antecedent to the — 
discovery of the West Indies, the embouchure of the 
