Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/280

230 I made inquiries here, as also at Salerno, amongst the fishermen and coasting sailors, as to whether any of them had felt the shock at sea, but could gain no intelligence of any such observer.

In the Ravina della Molini, behind the town of Amalfi, I observed some beds of ancient tufa deposited upon the precipitous sides of limestone at a considerable height above the present sea level.

Along the road between Amalfi and Salerno there are proofs of an elevation bodily of the land of from 300 to 400 feet since the formation and forcing up into a mountain range, of the great ridge of limestone that forms the peninsula. 1st. Beach gravel in wavy layers, quite similar to that on the existing shore, is found 300 feet above it at Punta d'Erchia. 2nd. Between that and Amalfi, in the limestone, the beds of which have a north and south strike, and dip slightly to the west, there are caves, the upper portions of the jaws and arches of which, some 70 or 80 feet above the existing beach, present the rounded and water-worn aspect, of long-continued action of the sea. Objects, such as the porphyry font at Amalfi, alleged to have been excavated from beneath the beach—ruins now existing below the sea level here and there, go for nothing, as along a line of coast so extremely precipitous as this, of shattered limestone, and so frequently shaken by earthquakes, whole cliffs, have doubtless frequently been shaken down, and plunged beneath the sea. The limestone all along, from the point of Capo del Tumulo, is metamorphic and altered, in its bedding and cleavage, and presents in many places, highly magnesian, and in some, trappean characters. Near Majori, fine masses of dark-brown stalactite occur,