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Show 378 STRUCTURE, AND MODE OF AOTION three centuries. The Peloponnesus has, between Epidaurus and Trcezene, near Methone, a Monte Nuovo described by Strabo and seen again by Dodwell, which is higher than the Monte Nuovo of the Phlegrrean Field near Baire, and perhaps even higher than the new volcano of J orullo in the plains of Mexico, which I found surrounded by several thousand small basaltic cones, which had been protruded from the earth, and were still smoking. In the Mediterranean and its shores, it is not only from the permanent craters of isolated mountains having a constant communication with the interior, as Stromboli, Vesuvius, and Etna, that volcanic fires break forth : at Ischia, on the Monte Epomeo, and also, as it would appear by the accounts of the ancients, in the Lelantine plain near Chalcis, lavas have flowed from fissures which have suddenly opened at the surface of the earth. Besides these phenomena-which fall within the historic period, or within the restricted domain of well-assured tradition, and which Carl Ritter will collect and elucidate in his masterly work on Geography-the shores of the Mediterranean exhibit numerous remains of more ancient volcanic action. In the south part of France, in Auvergne, we see a separate, complete system of volcanos arranged in lines, trachytic domes alternating with cones of eruption, from which streams of lava have flowed in narrow bands. The plain of Lombardy, as level as the surface of the sea, and forming an inner Gulf of the Adriatic, surrounds the trachyte of the Euganean Hills, where rise domes of granular trachyte, obsidian, and pearl-stone, masses connected by a common origin, which break through the lower cretaceous rock and nummulitic limestone, but have never flowed in narrow streams. Similar evidences of anuient revolutions of nature are found in several parts of the mainland of Greece and in Asia Minor, countries which will one day offer a rich field for geological investigation, when intellectual light shall revisit the seats from which it has radiated to theW estern world, and when oppressed humanity shall no longer be subject to the barbarism of Turkish rule. I recall the geographical proximity of these various phenomena, in order to show that the basin of the Mediterranean, with its series of islands, might have offered to an attentive observer much that has been recently discovered, under various forms, in South America, |
