America, which destroyed completely nine other villages and damaged many more. It says: "Such was the violence of the shock, that not a single house remained standing, and the monuments of the cemetery were thrown down, and many of them removed a considerable distance from their original sites. In thirty seconds the city of Cucuta was converted into a mountain of ruins. This horrible blow resulted in the death of more than ten thousand persons, in addition to another thousand who were seriously wounded and bruised." The Panama Star and Herald gives an account of the terrible earthquake that visited the South Pacific Coast in May 1877 "The terrible earthquake and tidal wave on the Peruvian and Bolivian Coasts, May 9, 1877, proves it to have been one of the severest calamities of the kind ever known. Six hundred lives and twenty millions worth of property were destroyed. At Mollendo, a violent hurricane unroofed houses, while the sea tore up the railway. At Arica, people were building defenses to repel the expected attack of the rebel ram Huascar. The shocks were numerous; the waves rose from ten to fifteen feet; houses, cars, locomotives, boats, etc., were tossed about like shuttle-cocks. The shock continued all night. "At Iquique at the same hour, 8: 30 P. M., the shaking began ; amid the horrors of falling buildings and quaking earth, a fire broke out, and while trying to stay the flames, the sea rushed in and swept everything away. "At Chanavya the earth opened in crevices fifteen meters deep. Two hundred persons were killed, dead bodies floated about the bay, and a pestilence was feared. The wave at Guanillos was sixty feet high, and that at Mexillones was sixty-five feet. A mine at Tocapilla caved in, smothering two hundred workmen. Cobija, in Bolivia, was swept of three fourths of its houses. The wave was thirty-five feet high. "The damage done the shipping was very great, some vessels being sunk with all on board, while the crews of a few were saved on spars and planks. The water at the anchorage suddenly receded so that ships in eight fathoms of water touched bottom. the same time the ships went swinging round and round in opposite directions, the anchor chains becoming entangled beneath the cop At per, and the yards and masts becoming interlocked, while the air resounded with falling spars, and the crash of bulwarks. The water also came whirling in like a maelstrom, causing the wrecks to spin round and round in great circles till they struck rocks and went down." The same paper, speaking of the eruption of Mauna Loa on the Sandwich Islands, near the close of the year 1880, says: "The grand eruption as reported now in progress from the volcanic cone of Mauna Loa, gives ample evidence of mighty forces at work under the bed of the Pacific. Mauna Loa towers over the island of Hawaii, the largest island in the open Pacific, 13,760 feet, and is marked by two distinct and apparently disconnected craters, -one at the summit, and the other, Kilauea, at a considerably lower level. A fearful eruption from the summit crater took place in 1840, and another in 1843 from the lower crater; but this was exceeded in August, 1855, when the fire stream' continued to flow for several months, until by July, 1856, it had traversed a distance of over sixty miles. "The floor of the great crater of Kilauea is said to resemble ‘a lake of fire,' having been scooped out a thousand feet deep, and covering an area of twenty square miles. This enormous vent seems to have been, for a benignant purpose, planted in the central Pacific ocean, whose 'great basin,' says Maury, 'has its rim resting upon volcanic formations, and is set with volcanoes all the way round.' One remarkable fact, which is confirmed by numerous eruptions, is that the discharge of molten matter, even in 1859, when shafts of white hot lava were thrown up to the estimated height of eight hundred feet, are attended by no earthquake shocks or other seismic signs. The burning lava, on reaching water, is shivered like glass into millions of particles, which, rising in clouds, darken the sky, and fall like a storm of hail on the surrounding country, while the glare from the fiery river converts night into brilliant day over all Eastern Hawaii." The Inter Occan gives the following particulars of the Java calamity:— "Java, one of the East India Islands, suffered from one of the most terrific volcanic eruptions ever recorded. The first demon |