Though Nature has made for man ample provision, she requires him not only to help himself, but to take care of himself. Nor does she give him formal notice to keep out of harm's way when she wishes to break up the earth's crust and re-cast it, but proceeds at once. She may sink or elevate a continent at a blow, or she may do it by slow degrees.
The earliest writers give us accounts of terrific earthquakes. Thucydides alludes to volcanic eruptions which occurred five hundred years before the Christian era. In the vicinity of volcanic mountains, it has happened that city after city, in the course of ages, has been engulfed, one upon another, in molten lava, or cinders, leaving no record behind them of their unhappy fate. Herculaneum lies buried a hundred feet deep beneath the modern city of Portici; and beneath Herculaneum, a city still more ancient has been discovered, whose name and history are entirely unknown. How many other cities lie buried at the foot of the old fire-crowned monarch of Italy, no one can tell; but doubtless there are several of them. What induced people to occupy a locality so perilous, it is difficult to say, unless it was the superior fertility of a volcanic soil.
No part of the world is exempt from sudden calamities of a similar character. The earthquake experienced by the city of Antioch in Syria, in the year 626, destroyed two hundred and fifty thousand people. The great eruption of Mount Etna, in 1669, overflowed fourteen towns, containing from three to four thousand inhabitants each. The stream of lava which issued from the mountain was half a mile wide and forty feet deep, and swept everything before it, until lost in the sea. The earthquake at Lisbon, in 1775, killed sixty thousand persons in six minutes; the shock was felt in Switzerland, in Scotland, in Massachusetts, and on the shore of Lake Ontario. In 1783, a large river in Iceland was sunk into the earth by volcanic action, and entirely obliterated. In 1792, an earthquake in the island of Java sunk a tract of land fifteen miles long and six miles wide, carrying down with it forty small villages. In our own country and in our own neighborhood, in 1811, several islands in the Mississippi River, near New Madrid, were sunk by an earthquake, and the course of the river driven back eighteen miles, causing it to overflow the adjacent lands; about half the county of New Madrid, as well as the village, was submerged. Several new lakes were created, one of which was sixty miles long and several miles wide. The earth's surface rose in undulations like the billows of the sea, and with terrific utterances, opened yawning chasms, from which vast columns of sand and water, and a substance resembling coke, were thrown out. The whole face of the country in that region was materially changed. And, what is a little singular, one of the lakes thus created by the earthquake extended to the river at a point nearly opposite the famous Island No. 10, thus affording a natural canal by which the Union forces in the late civil war approached and took the island.