Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Hypothesis According To Which, In The Earthquakes Of Cumana,
Elastic Fluids Tend To Escape From The Surface Of The Soil, Seems
Confirmed By The Great Noise Which Is Heard During The Shocks At
The Borders Of The Wells In The Plain Of Charas.
Water and sand are
sometimes thrown out twenty feet high.
Similar phenomena were
observed in ancient times by the inhabitants of those parts of
Greece and Asia Minor abounding with caverns, crevices, and
subterraneous rivers. Nature, in her uniform progress, everywhere
suggests the same ideas of the causes of earthquakes, and the means
by which man, forgetting the measure of his strength, pretends to
diminish the effect of the subterraneous explosions. What a great
Roman naturalist has said of the utility of wells and caverns* is
repeated in the New World by the most ignorant Indians of Quito,
when they show travellers the guaicos, or crevices of Pichincha. (*
"In puteis est remedium, quale et crebri specus praebent: conceptum
enim spiritum exhalant: quod in certis notatur oppidis, quae minus
quatiuntur, crebris ad eluviem cuniculis cavata." - Pliny lib. 2 c.
82 (ed. Par. 1723 t. 1 page 112.) Even at present, in the capital
of St. Domingo, wells are considered as diminishing the violence of
the shocks. I may observe on this occasion, that the theory of
earthquakes, given by Seneca, (Nat. Quaest. lib. 6 c. 4-31),
contains the germ of everything that has been said in our times on
the action of the elastic vapours confined in the interior of the
globe.)
The subterranean noise, so frequent during earthquakes, is
generally not in the ratio of the force of the shocks.
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