to an
earthquake, which drew down masses of rock, and stopped up the course of
the Peneus in the narrow defile between mounts Ossa and Olympus.

As to the deluge of Samothrace, which is generally referred to a
distinct date, it appears that the shores of that small island and the
adjoining mainland of Asia were inundated by the sea. Diodorus Siculus
says that the inhabitants had time to take refuge in the mountains, and
save themselves by flight; he also relates, that long after the event
the fishermen of the island drew up in their nets the capitals of
columns, which were the remains of cities submerged by that terrible
catastrophe.[487] These statements scarcely leave any doubt that there
occurred, at the period alluded to, a subsidence of the coast,
accompanied by earthquakes and inroads of the sea. It is not impossible
that the story of the bursting of the Black Sea through the Thracian
Bosphorus into the Grecian Archipelago, which accompanied, and, as some
say, caused the Samothracian deluge, may have reference to a wave, or
succession of waves, raised in the Euxine by the same convulsion.

We know that subterranean movements and volcanic eruptions are often
attended not only by incursions of the sea, but also by violent rains,
and the complete derangement of the river drainage of the inland
country, and by the damming up of the outlets of lakes by landslips, or
obstructions in the courses of subterranean rivers, such as abound in
Thessaly and the Morea. We need not therefore be surprised at the
variety of causes assigned for the traditional floods of Greece, by
Herodotus, Aristotle, Diodorus, Strabo, and others. As to the area
embraced, had all the Grecian deluges occurred simultaneously, instead
of being spread over many centuries, and had they, instead of being
extremely local, reached at once from the Euxine to the southwestern
limit of the Peloponnese, and from Macedonia to Rhodes, the devastation
would still have been more limited than that which visited Chili in
1835, when a volcanic eruption broke out in the Andes, opposite Chiloe,
and another at Juan Fernandez, distant 720 geographical miles, at the
same time that several lofty cones, in the Cordillera, 400 miles to the
eastward of that island, threw out vapor and ignited matter. Throughout
a great part of the space thus recently shaken in South America, cities
were laid in ruins, or the land was permanently upheaved, or mountainous
waves rolled inland fr