God-fearing armies, as Carlyle tells us, are the best armies. So, as Bagehot has pointed out, those kinds of morals and that kind of religion which tend to make the firmest and most effectual character are sure to prevail, all else being the same; and creeds or systems that conduce to a soft, limp mind tend to perish. Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger. Such is, no doubt, another cause why monotheism tends to prevail over polytheism. It at once attracts and produces steadier character. It is not confused by competing rites nor distracted by miscellaneous duties.

As in man, at the outset, the moral and spiritual faculties lie mostly latent, overshadowed by his animal wants and passions, so the gods, in whose image he fashions at first the dimly discerned divine, are beings of physical power and sensuous nature, personifications of giant strength, imperative will, terrible passions, dangerous to arouse—a wanton Mylitta, a thievish Hermes, an implacable Pluto, the Moloch only to be propitiated by giving him the best-beloved child to devour in his sacred flame; or a burly Thor, whose hammer-blows rive huge valleys in the ground, to whom any deceit by which he may overcome his foes is entirely allowable.

From this low nature range, where morality is not yet known, the conceptions of the gods move up to the philosophic level, and from that to the ethical range. The Hindoo Rita, at first simply the fixed path of the sun or other heavenly bodies, became, as the next step, generalized in law or order in the abstract; and then was exalted into the celestial path of rectitude and peace, the eternal power making for righteousness. Osiris, at first the setting sun, becomes next the mysterious principle of life and harmony; then, the great judge of men's conduct, the source of good.

All nature-religions, derived as they are from the physical world and its processes, and originating in the infancy of civilization, are ethically imperfect. They are not immoral, so much as innocent of those distinctions, modesties, and virtues, to which so much regard is later given. But, just because of this, many incidents of their sacred histories come in time to seem impure and revolting. While Zeus was clearly recognized as the sky that fertilizes the earth and quickens nature, the myths of his manifold amours-how, in swan-garb of feathery cirrhus, he approaches and overshadows Leda; how in a shower of golden, sunlight rain he impregnates Danaë, the imprisoned earth of frosty spring-all these would be intelligible and inoffensive. But when Zeus became the supreme ruler of earth and heaven, the allholy law-giver, then men could not but soon find these narratives shocking to their moral sense. We do not easily bear the thought that the objects of our worship should be inferior in any respect to ourselves. When this is felt, then the worship must be radically reformed, or it falls before some faith of purer type.

All the great universal religions - Buddhism, Christianity, and

Mohammedanism—are distinguished for their high moral quality, and by this won their glorious victories; and their crystallization in the heart of a noble-minded prophet and reformer was in each case preceded by a great social and moral quickening throughout the community in which they arose. When the depths of the human heart are moved and the imperative claims of justice, truth, and purity once perceived, then the death - knell of mere nature-worship has been rung in that land. As the pagan god, Wäinamöinen, in the Finnish epic of the Kalevala, when he hears of the birth of Christ, enters his canoe and paddles away to the northern wastes of snow and silence, so must the worship of force give way to the more majestic divinity of conscience. The varied influences of man's environment conspire with the aspiring instincts of his in most soul to conduct him constantly out of the imperfect toward the perfect. Whether or not he reach it, it is that that must be the goal of his striving.

THE

ISCHIA AND ITS EARTHQUAKES.

BY M. CH. VÉLAIN.

HE island of Ischia, which has recently been so terribly rent by an earthquake, is situated in the northwestern part of the Bay of Naples, and near the Phlegrean fields, with which the little island of Procida, likewise volcanic, constitutes a connecting link. It forms a part of the Neapolitan volcanic region, which may be considered as still in a state of solfatarian activity, which is exemplified by the well known solfatara of Puzzuoli, where the sulphur is re-deposited, as far as it is mined, by numerous gaseous emanations, and by the escape of carbonic acid in the Grotto del Cane near Lake Agnano. All of these exhalations, which are the mark of a declining volcanic activity, attest that this region, situated on a great line of fracture running northwest and southeast from Vesuvius to Vultura, is still in direct

communication with the subterranean sources. The ancients fully recognized this, and regarded all those explosive craters, now transformed into a chain of remarkably picturesque lakes across the Phlegrean fields, as so many doors of Tartarus through which the infernal divinities took souls to the banks of the Acheron. The most celebrated of them, Lake Avernus, "Atri Janua Ditis" (the gate of black hell), now smiling and salubrious, then exhaled torrents of suffocating gases which well justified its name, and rendered a stay there mortal to the birds that ventured into its neighborhood.

The Neapolitan volcanic region extends from Vesuvius to Vultura, on the eastern edge of the Apennines, and includes the Phlegrean fields and the connected islands of Ischia and Procida. The volcanic activity

of this whole space is now concentrated at Vesuvius, and is manifested at other places in the vicinity only by the emanations and thermal springs of which we have spoken, and from time to time, during periods when the volcano is inactive, by violent shocks, of which the terrible disaster of the 28th of July, at Ischia, has just given an impressive example.

Previous to the Christian era, Vesuvius, covered with a rich vegetation, was wholly inactive. Nothing except the form of the mountain could give a suspicion of the intensity of the fires that were raging beneath it. Volcanic activity, then localized in the Phlegrean fields,

FIG. 1.-BAY OF NAPLES. GEOLOGICAL MAP SHOWING THE RELATIONS OF ISCHIA WITH THE

PHLEGREAN FIELDS.

attained its maximum in Ischia, which was its escape-valve during the entire period of Vesuvian quiet. It produced then, through the action of a large number of eruptions taking place within a period of several thousand years, a considerable island, which now rises more than eight hundred metres, or two thousand six hundred feet, above the level of the sea. It is eighty kilometres, or a little less than fifty miles, in circumference at the level of the sea, eight kilometres, or not quite five miles, long from east to west, and eight kilometres, or about three miles, broad. From its center rises Mount Epomeo, which, crowned by an abrupt, semicircular rampart, which is nothing else than the eastern edge of the grand crater, whence have issued all the trachytic projections that now form the greater part of the island, presents the somber aspect of a fire-vomiting mountain. This crater has never given out lavas. Built on masses of pumiceous tufas of slight con

sistency, the lava-flows have always been produced upon the slope or at the base of the mountain. At each of the orifices of issue the projections forced out by tumultuous jets of gas have formed adventitious cones of dimensions often considerable, like those of il Toppo, il Trippiti, and il Garifoli; and we may count some ten such cones around Epomeo, all of which have been centers of activity and furnished large flows.

The appearance of Ischia was relatively of recent date; it is not placed farther back than the older quaternary. The foundation of the island was begun by submarine eruptions, above which opened the crater of Epomeo, at first appearing above the surface of the sea as an annular reef, from which were thrown out jets of trachytic scoria. The island was raised up in successive stages by the accumulation of the projected matter around the orifice of issue. The proof of this is drawn from the fact that we may still find on the sides of Mount Epomeo, carried to a height of four hundred and seventy metres, masses of marine shells of species yet living in the Mediterranean, encased in clays that have resulted from the decomposition of trachytic tufas under water. The whole of this trachytic mass is itself established on marls and clays, including numerous remains of Mediterranean shells, and has evidently acquired its present relief within the historical epoch.

The most ancient of the recorded eruptions in Ischia was that of Montagnone, to which is ascribed the origin of the vast crater of regular form that still existed before the recent earthquake, in a state of perfect preservation, in the northwestern part of Ischia. About 470 B. C., successive eruptions at Point Comacchia gave rise to the vast flows of Manecoco and Bale, which extended far into the sea and prolonged the point to the north. Numerous efforts have been made since these ancient times to plant colonies on this unstable land, even then fertile and covered with a luxuriant vegetation.

Lyell, who made a long exploration of the island in 1828, relates that first the Erythreans and afterward the Chalcideans, who had settled in the island before the Christian era, were driven away by the incessant earthquakes and the mephitic exhalations escaping from every point. At a later time, 280 B. C., Hiero, king of Syracuse, tried to found a colony there, but it was soon driven away by a formidable explosion preceding the great flows of lava which gave rise to the masses now forming the promontories of Zaro and Camso.

The same fate befell the Grecian colonies which afterward tried at different times to occupy the island. The eruption that forced the retreat of the first Grecian colony gave rise to Monte Rosato, that cone of projections the sudden formation of which is comparable to that of Monte Nuovo. The last-named mountain was raised in September, 1538, in forty-eight hours, at Puzzuoli, after a succession of formidable shocks which occasioned great disasters in the Phlegrean

fields and destroyed a great number of Roman buildings. These two mountains of volcanic erection, formed under similar conditions, at two distinct epochs corresponding in each case with a period of repose in Vesuvius, are distinguished by their regular form, which may be compared with that of the classic volcanoes of the chain of the puys of Auvergne. Both, terminating in a vast crater, have emitted, like the volcanoes of Auvergne, only a single flow of lava, which seems to have exhausted all their energy. A long period of repose followed. During more than a century "Ischia the Joyous," as it was called, rested in perfect tranquillity. The pleasure-loving Romans made of it the most enchanting resort in the world; all their magnates had villas there.

It is to be remarked that this period of repose was correspondent with a resumption of activity on Vesuvius. The first symptom of an awakening of energy in that volcano was an earthquake, which in the year 68 occasioned considerable damage in the neighboring towns. We know well how, eleven years later, in 79, the hitherto peaceful mountain, covered at the time with rich plantations and forests nearly to its crater, revealed by a sudden explosion the terrible force that was sleeping in its depths. La Somma, reduced to powder, was projected into the air; then a column of thick smoke was seen to rise vertically from the summit of the mountain, and to spread horizontally, covering the country under its immense shadows. The sun was ob scured even as far as to Rome, and it was believed that the "great night of the earth" was about to begin. When light was restored, the dismantled mountain had changed its form; the luxuriant forests that had covered it had disappeared, and so had the populous cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiæ, buried, with their inhabitants, under ashes and volcanic débris. From this time, Vesuvius does not appear to have emitted any eruption of lava for several hundred years; and this period of quiet at that center seems to have been marked at Ischia by a resumption of the fires of Epomeo, which had enjoyed so long a rest that large forests had grown up to the very edge of its crater. In 1302, after the island had been shaken with a succession of earthquakes during the previous year, the lava gushed out by a new opening near the city of Ischia, and in less than four hours reached the sea, having destroyed everything in its passage as if it had been a torrent of fire. The city was terribly afflicted; large houses and numerous villas were buried, with their inhabitants. The rough surface of this lava stream has resisted all weathering, and still refuses to bear any vegetation. The new eruptive phase was of long duration, and it is remarked that while it continued Vesuvius was quiet. The alternations between the eruptive movements of lava in the two volcanic centers find a natural explanation in the facts that they are both on the same line of fracture, and a subterranean communication probably exists between them.