mony to the uneasy condition of the land. This place was once the strong-hold of France in America, and had one of the finest harbors in the world. It was well fortified, and had a population of twenty thousand souls within its walls. It was destroyed during the French and Indian war, and the inhabitants dispersed. But Nature had herself or dained its abandonment. The rock on which the brave General Wolfe landed has nearly disappeared. The sea now flows within the walls of the city, and sites once inhabited have become the ocean's bed. In 1822 the entire coast of Chili was elevated to a height varying from two to seven feet-an extent equal to the area of New England and New York having been lifted up bodily. In 1831, an 18, 1831. island, since called Graham's Island, sprang from the bed of the Mediterranean between Sicily and the site of ancient Carthage. The island is now again but a sunken reef. Another island, as recently as 1866, rose from the bottom of the Grecian Archipelago, before the very eyes of the American consul, Mr. Canfield, bearing upon its Fig. 6. View of Graham's Island, July slimy back fragments of wrecks that had been sunken in the little harbor of Santorin. Similar ocean-births had many times previously been witnessed in the same vicinity. A hundred and sixty-six years before our era the island of Hyera rose. It was lifted successively higher by earthquake-throbs in the years 19, 726, and 1427. In 1707 Nea-Kameni made its appearance, and in 1773 Micra-Kameni. Even the ancient islands of Santorin, Thrasia, and Aphronisi themselves rose from the sea at the termination of an earthquake some ages before the Christian era. The ancient Greek fable of the floating islands called Symplegades probably originated in the volcanic movements of the earth's crust in the vicinity of the Thracian Bosporus, the ineffaceable traces of which are still to be seen. The entire chain of the Aleutian Islands, ranging across the North Pacific from Alaska to Kamtschatka, is but a series of vestiges of an ancient ridge of land now worn out, but originally raised by the power of volcanic fires which are even to-day smouldering beneath the bed of the sea. These fires, as late as 1796, burst out a few miles north of the island of Unalaska, and added another member to the group, which has continued to grow in size till recent times. As might be expected, the records of continental oscillations are not confined to sea-coast lines, but may be detected along our lakes and in the valleys of the rivers. If such changes occur in a lifetime, what may not a slow subsidence or elevation amount to in the lifetime of our race? A depression in the valley of the Lower Mississippi of only three hundred feet would admit the waters of the Gulf of Mexico up to the mouth of the Ohio. A trifling depression in Northern Illinois would furnish an outlet to the Gulf for Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron. A depression of eight hundred feet would submerge nearly the whole of the Southern and Western States. How easy, then, in view of facts which every body can observe, to admit the geological doctrine of the former submergence of all the continents. The shells broken from the wall of the gorge at Trenton Falls, though unlike any fresh-water forms, are still the kindred of beings now living in the Atlantic; and, with the evidence before us, we can not resist the conviction that the dominion of the sea once extended over the Empire State. As the relics of Roman B dominion are found in England and France, and Germany and Palestine, and nobody questions the testimony of these relics, so the antiquities of Old Ocean have been exhumed from the soil of every state. Who can now perpetrate the folly of denying to one empire the universality which every body concedes to the other? So reasoned Fracastoro when, in 1517, the exhumation of a multitude of curious petrifactions at Verona, in Italy, had aroused the speculations of numerous writers. But his reasonable suggestion was too bold for the philosophy of that age, and Fracastoro was stamped a heretic by that papal orthodoxy which persecuted also "The starry Galileo with his woes." |