1832,] 
EARTHQUAKES, 
447 
CHAPTER XXVI. 
Earthquakes in Lima— Destruction of the city— Callao overflowed and destroyed by 
the sea— Visit Valparaiso— Return to Callao, touching at Coquimbo— Falmouth 
sails for the United States — Potomac proceeds to the north. 
Those who dwell in a tranquil country, seldom visited by the 
slightest terrestrial vibrations, can with diificulty form an adequate 
idea of those terrible convulsions of the earth which ravage 
and lay waste the largest and most splendid cities, and overturn 
the very mountains, in countries less favoured by nature in this 
respect. ^ 
We are accustomed to look upon the earth with a convictiom 
that it is solid and fixed beneath our feet, and few of us can re- 
ahze that it has been, and is still, in some parts of the world, sub- 
ject to undulations more terrific than the mightiest surges of the 
rolling ocean. 
Geologists were formerly in the habit of accounting for all the 
great revolutions the surface of our planet has undergone, by re- 
ferring them entirely to an aqueous origin. The ocean, from some 
causes, was supposed to have overwhelmed the land, and to have 
buried beneath its waves the loftiest mountains— the fossil shells 
and other marine animal remains upon them were triumphantly 
pointed at as proofs that the sea had risen to their summits. It 
was their opinion that the sea alone was liable to change of level, 
and it never entered into their minds to conceive that the solid 
earth was also subject to these changes. It is now satisfactorily 
ascertained that the land is not always terra Jirma, but ishable to 
sudden elevation from subterranean causes. That the bottom of 
the mighty deep has been broken up, and its sedimentary de- 
posites, with all the various organized beings it contained imbed- 
ded, were solidified into rocks, and elevated above the surface by 
powerful causes acting beneath the crust of the globe ! 
In Europe, the countries most subject to earthquakes are those 
situated near active or extinct volcanoes. Calabria has been rav- 
aged by them from one extreme to the other. Sicily and Naples 
