(* I Stated In Another Place The Influence Of That Great Catastrophe On The Counter-Revolution Which The Royalist Party Succeeded In Bringing About At That Time In Venezuela.

It is impossible to conceive anything more curious than the negociation opened on the 5th of April, by the

Republican government, established at Valencia in the valleys of Aragua, with Archbishop Prat (Don Narciso Coll y Prat), to engage him to publish a pastoral letter calculated to tranquilize the people respecting the wrath of the deity. The Archbishop was permitted to say that this wrath was merited on account of the disorder of morals; but he was enjoined to declare positively that politics and systematic opinions on the new social order had nothing in common with it. Archbishop Prat lost his liberty after this singular correspondence.) The elastic forces which agitate the ground, the still-burning volcanoes, the hot sulphurous springs, sometimes containing fluoric acid, the presence of asphaltum and naphtha in primitive strata, all point to the interior of our planet, the high temperature of which is perceived even in mines of little depth, and which, from the times of Heraclitus of Ephesus, and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, to the Plutonic theory of modern days, has been considered as the seat of all great disturbances of the globe.

The sketch I have just traced contains all the formations known in that part of Europe which has served as the type of positive geology. It is the fruit of sixteen months' labour, often interrupted by other occupations.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 599 of 635
Words from 164899 to 165152 of 174507