of about five feet of river sand, with a substratum about
twelve feet thick of red alluvial clay. In the neighborhood are several
rivers and torrents, which descend from the mountains charged with vast
quantities of mud, sand, and shingle; and within the memory of persons
now living the modern Behat has been threatened by an inundation, which,
after retreating, left the neighboring country strewed over with a
superficial covering of sand several feet thick. In sinking wells in the
environs, masses of shingle and boulders have been reached resembling
those now in the river-channels of the same district, under a deposit of
thirty feet of reddish loam. Captain Cautley, therefore, who directed
the excavations, supposes that the matter discharged by torrents has
gradually raised the whole country skirting the base of the lower hills;
and that the ancient town, having been originally built in a hollow, was
submerged by floods, and covered over with sediment seventeen feet in
thickness.[1037]

We are informed, by M. Boblaye, that in the Morea, the formation termed
caramique, consisting of pottery, tiles, and bricks, intermixed with
various works of art, enters so largely into the alluvium and vegetable
soil upon the plains of Greece, and into hard and crystalline breccias
which have been formed at the foot of declivities, that it constitutes
an important stratum which might, in the absence of zoological
characters, serve to mark our epoch in a most indestructible
manner.[1038]

_Landslips._--The landslip, by suddenly precipitating large masses of
rock and soil into a valley, overwhelms a multitude of animals, and
sometimes buries permanently whole villages, with their inhabitants and
large herds of cattle. Thus three villages, with their entire
population, were covered, when the mountain of Piz fell in 1772, in the
district of Treviso, in the state of Venice,[1039] and part of Mount
Grenier, south of Chambery, in Savoy, which fell down in the year 1248,
buried five parishes, including the town and church of St. Andra, the
ruins occupying an extent of about nine square miles.[1040]

The number of lives lost by the slide of the Rossberg, in Switzerland,
in 1806, was estimated at more than 800, a great number of the bodies,
as well as several villages and scattered houses, being buried deep
under mud and rock. In the same country, several hundred cottages, with
eighteen of their inhabitants and a great number of cows, goats, an