Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/346

 several large storehouses in the harbour of Port Royal subsided to a depth of between twenty-four and forty-eight feet under water, apparently without disturbing the masonry, as the buildings remained standing, with the tops of the chimneys erect above the water. A large tract of land around the town, about 1000 acres in extent, subsided in less than a minute, and was covered over by the waters of the sea.

The fearful shock which destroyed Lima, in Peru, in 1746, submerged the entire coast near Callao, converting it into a bay of the sea.

In the great earthquake of 1755, the new quay, at Lisbon, then recently built of massive and solid marble, on which a vast number of people had collected for safety, sank suddenly down with its living load, and not one of the bodies ever rose to the surface again; and, more extraordinary still, a number of boats and ships lying at anchor a little distance off the quay, went suddenly down with the body of water beneath them as into a whirlpool, and not a fragment of the wrecks was ever after seen; upon sounding the spot afterwards, it was ascertained to be some 600 feet deep.

Before the earthquake which visited Messina in 1783, the ground along the port of that city was perfectly level; after the shock it was found to slope considerably towards the sea, the latter itself getting deeper and deeper as the distance from the shore increased—an indication that the sloping of the