XIV. Death through Eruptions in Lature. "The hills move lightly, and the mountains smoke; Ocean has caught the frenzy, and upwrought Gone with the refluent wave into the deep, A prince with half his people." COWPER, A PORTION of mankind have been exposed to death operation of the When the world through the direct and extraordinary more stupendous agencies in nature. was destroyed by the deluge; when fire from heaven fell on the cities of the plain, or on the captains and their troops who were sent against Elijah; when Korah and his associates were either burned or engulphed, these agencies were employed to attest miraculously the divine displeasure. But inundations, lightning, the volcano, the earthquake, the avalanche, without any special token of that displeasure, and without a miracle, have put an end to many lives in a single hour. On those lowlands which sometimes lie along the margin of the seas, vast floods have rolled in, and swept multitudes away. The Zuyder Zee and the Harlaem Lake were formed by such inundations, when the dykes of Holland yielded, and many lives were lost; and thus, in the winter of 1808, four hundred bodies floated on the flood, near Arnheim. An inundation of the Neva, in 1824, destroyed three thousand; and six thousand were overwhelmed, in 1802, in the vale of Lorca in Spain, by the waters of a reservoir. Earthquakes have often hurled a mass of mountainous billows upon the shore: thus the sea at Lisbon came in like a wall, and in a moment bore back a crowd of dead into its bosom; and thus, at Alexandria, in 365, fifty thousand lost their lives, when an earthquake was followed by a similar inundation. In 1780, a single wave drowned the whole town of Savannah-la-Mar, with all its inhabitants. Even more terrific to the uninstructed mind might be that sharp interposition of a sudden, irresistible shaft, directed from the heavens, seeming to single out an individual, and blasting him in an instant. Deaths by lightning are few; yet so one Roman emperor, Carus, was reported to have died in the night; and so a distinguished orator of the American Revolution, James Otis, was struck down as he looked from his door on an approaching storm. Scattered over the earth are those peaks from which the internal flame finds issue; and around their bases lie the habitations of men. Torrents of lava and showers of ashes, poured from the craters, have surprised and overwhelmed individuals, or even the population of villages or cities. In that eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii, there was, notwithstanding the general flight of the inhabitants, a wide loss of lives: the skeleton of the mother with her infant, has been found, and that of the householder, or steward, with his keys; the elder Pliny was fatally overtaken by the ashes, when he had drawn too near; and an Agrippa perished with Drusilla his mother. When Catania, in 1669, was almost buried by the earthquake and the attendant eruption of Etna, the flood of lava was stopped by the city walls, sixty feet in height, till it rose above them, and fell over like a cataract of fire, while about twenty-seven thousand perished, more by the earthquake than the lava. At Antioch, in 526, two hundred and fifty thousand are said to have been destroyed by an earthquake; at Port Royal, in 1692, two thousand persons perished; at Lisbon, in 1755, sixty thousand in six minutes; at Damascus, in 1759, six thousand; at Caraccas, in 1812, nine thousand; at Safed, in 1837, five thousand. Bagdad, Aleppo, and Lima; Jamaica, Guadaloupe, and the islands of the West Indies, have been visited with a like tremendous destruction. The sufferers have been crushed by the falling walls, or engulphed in the waters or the fissures. At Callao, in 1747, a great multitude were gathered upon a quay or pier, which so sank with them all, that none of the bodies ever were seen upon the surface: : one man alone escaped. A vast number were swallowed up in the earthquakes in Italy, under the Emperor Gallienus. In the earthquakes of Calabria, between 1783 and 1786, twenty-nine thousand died under the ruins. Avalanches of ice have occasionally swept the hunter or the traveller down some precipice or ravine, burying him as he fell. The village of Leuk, with its baths, was overwhelmed in 1719, and many of the people perished. Avalanches of earth, which have been gradually undermined and separated from the hill-sides, have covered houses and hamlets; as the inhabitants of the village of Goldau, in Switzerland, died, almost to the number of five hundred, under a mass of rocks and sand from the neighbouring mountain. But these events, although they so startle all men, and impress themselves on history, or on memory, are yet rare; and all the thousands to whom death has come through these great and extraordinary agencies of nature, might scarcely be considered in an enumeration of the modes of death, if numbers alone claimed regard or yielded instruction from the grave. There is, however, a peculiar power in deaths like these, the greater because they are unusual. It was thus that Omnipotence interposed to destroy, when it was designed that the terror of death as His immediate judgment on a multitude, at city, or a world, should be manifest. The heathen, in all ages, felt the divinity of such visitations with a special awe, either the awe of remaining truth, or that of blind superstition. No long chain of causes and effects here joins the event to the hand of its supreme Author, and distracts the attention of man: he sees himself brought into direct contact with those tremendous powers which no human skill or strength could ever attempt to baffle. He seems left with his Maker, who wields the earth to entomb him, or bids it pour forth its flames or its waters to sweep him from its bosom, or sends to his frame an arrow from the heavens. It is no special judgment, no preternatural instrument: the Almighty decree is just as truly and as directly fulfilled at the calmest and easiest deathbed: but to man the letters are here more burn ingly visible. XV. Death by Water. "Peril and dismay Wave their black ensigns o'er the watery way." FALCONER. THE greater part of the solid globe is covered by an element at once too dense to allow our organs to act within its embrace, and not dense enough to sustain our weight upon its surface. Man cannot long survive in the waters; and yet he cannot venture far without standing on their brink, or crossing their brooks, rivers, bays, lakes or seas. Then, the slightest accident, a step beyond the edge, a breath of wind, a wave higher than the rest, a leak, a loss of his footing for a moment, is death. A mighty company, therefore, are they who have sunk beneath the waters. Attempting to ford the rapid stream, the savage is borne downward, and perhaps hurried over the cataract. Launching forth in his frail boat, another, by a single heedless movement, is plunged below, and disappears. As ages and arts advance, the bolder barks of commerce and piracy are dashed on rocks and shoals: the danger is first noted when the mariner has been overwhelmed, and the safer paths are gradually discovered, after the more perilous have been the graves of many. No triumph of science or skill has ever quite removed these perils of the ocean. It is computed that of those whose business is upon the deep, a proportion |