tWSAXtsrACTOltY IJIEOltlKS. 
409 
these commotions at the Mission of Encaramada, a country 
entirely granitic, where they were accompanied by loud ex- 
plosions. Great fallings-in of the earth took place in the 
mountain Paurari, and near the rock Aravacoto a small 
island disappeared in the Orinoco. The undulatory motion 
continued during a whole hour. This seemed the first- 
signal of those violent commotions which shook the coasts 
of Cumana and Cariaco for more than ten months. It 
might be supposed that men living in woods, with no other 
shelter than huts of reeds and palm-leaves, could have little 
to dread from earthquakes. Put at Erevato and Caura, 
where these phenomena arc of rare occurrence, they terrify 
the Indians, frighten the beasts of the forests, and impe' 
the crocodiles to quit the waters for the shore. Nearer tin. 
sea, where shocks are frequent, far from being dreaded by 
I he inhabitants, they are regarded with satisfaction as the 
prognostics of a wet and fertile year. 
In this dissertation on the earthquakes of Terra Pinna 
and on the volcanos of the neighbouruig archipelago of the 
\Pest India Islands, I have pursued the plan of first relating 
a number of particular facts, and then considering them in 
one general point of view. Everything announces in the 
interior of the globe the operation of active powers, which, 
by mutual reaction, balance and modify one another. The 
greater our ignorance of the causes of these undulatory 
movements, these evolutions of heat, these formations of 
elastic fluids, the more it becomes the duty of persons who 
apply themselves to the study of physical science to examine 
the relations which these phenomena so uniformly present 
at great distances apart. It is only by considering these 
various relations under a general point of view, and tracing 
them over a great extent of the surface of the globe, through 
formations of rocks the most different, that we are led to 
abandon the supposition of trifling local causes, strata of 
pyrites, or of ignited coal.* 
The following is the series of phenomena remarked on the 
northern coasts of Cumana, Nueva Barcelona, and Caracas ; 
and presumed to be connected with the causes which pro- 
See “ \ iews of Nature,” — On the structure and action of volcanos 
in different parts of the world,— p. 353 (Bohn’s ed.): also "Cosmos,” 
pp. 199—225 (Bohn’s ed.). 
