the
arches;[724] so that, although the phenomena before described prove that
this mole has been uplifted ten feet above the level at which it once
stood, it is still evident that it has not yet been restored to its
original position.

A modern writer also reminds us, that these effects are not so local as
some would have us to believe; for on the opposite side of the Bay of
Naples, on the Sorrentine coast, which, as well as Puzzuoli, is subject
to earthquakes, a road, with some fragments of Roman buildings, is
covered to some depth by the sea. In the island of Capri, also, which is
situated some way out at sea, in the opening of the Bay of Naples, one
of the palaces of Tiberius is now covered with water.[725]

That buildings should have been submerged, and afterwards upheaved,
without being entirely reduced to a heap of ruins, will appear no
anomaly, when we recollect that, in the year 1819, when the delta of the
Indus sank down, the houses within the fort of Sindree subsided beneath
the waves without being overthrown. In like manner, in the year 1692,
the buildings round the harbor of Port Royal, in Jamaica, descended
suddenly to the depth of between thirty and fifty feet under the sea
without falling. Even on small portions of land transported to a
distance of a mile down a declivity, tenements, like those near Mileto,
in Calabria, were carried entire. At Valparaiso buildings were left
standing in 1822, when their foundations, together with a long tract of
the Chilian coast, were permanently upraised to the height of several
feet. It is still more easy to conceive that an edifice may escape
falling during the upheaval or subsidence of land, if the walls are
supported on the exterior and interior with a deposit like that which
surrounded and filled to the height of ten or eleven feet the temple of
Serapis all the time it was sinking, and which enveloped it to more than
twice that height when it was rising again to its original level.

We can scarcely avoid the conclusion, as Mr. Babbage has hinted, "that
the action of heat is in some way or other the cause of the phenomena of
the change of level of the temple. Its own hot spring, its immediate
contiguity to the Solfatara, its nearness to the Monte Nuovo, the hot
spring at the baths of Nero (No. 6, fig. 88), on the opposite side of
the Bay of Baiae; the boiling springs and ancient volcanoes of Ischia on
one side and Vesuvius on the other, are the most prominent of a