220 



teorological change becomes the presage of these 

 great revolutions of nature. 



The hypothesis according to which, in the 

 earthquakes of Cumana, elastic fluids tend to 

 escape from the surface of the soil, seems con- 

 firmed by the observation of the dreadful noise, 

 which is heard during the shocks at the borders 

 of the wells in the plain of Charas. Water and 

 sand are sometimes thrown out twenty feet high. 

 Similar phenomena have not escaped the ob- 

 servation of the ancients, who inhabited parts of 

 Greece and Asia Minor abounding with caverns, 

 crevices, and subterraneous rivers. Nature, in 

 it's uniform progress, every where suggests the 

 same ideas of the causes of earthquakes, and 

 the means by which man, forgetting the measure 

 of his strength, pretends to diminish the effect of 

 the subterraneous explosions. What a great 

 Roman naturalist has said of the utility of wells 

 and caverns* is repeated in the New World 



* In puteis est remediura, quale et crebri specus praebent : 

 conceptum enira spiritura exhalant ; quod in certis notatur 

 oppidis, quae minus quatiuntur, crebris ad eluviem cuniculis 

 cavata. Plin. Lib. ii, c. 82. (ed. Par. 1725, t. i, p. 112.) 

 Even at present, in the capital of St. Domingo, wells are 

 considered as diminishing the violence of the shocks. I 

 shall observe on this occasion, that the theory of earthquakes, 

 given by Seneca (Nat. Quaest., Lib. vi, c. 4 — 31), contains 

 the germe of every thing that has been said in our times on 

 the action of the elastic vapors confined in the interior of the 

 Globe. (Compare MicheH, in the Phil. Trans., t. li, p. 566— 



