Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/225

 upraised from the deep bottom of the sea, forming islands resembling that which, in the vicinity of the Azores, appeared thrice periodically, at nearly equal intervals, in three centuries. The Peloponnesus has, between Epidaurus and Trœzene, near Methone, a Monte Nuovo described by Strabo and seen again by Dodwell, which is higher than the Monte Nuovo of the Phlegræan Fields near Baiæ, and perhaps even higher than the new volcano of Jorullo 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 phænomena, 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