iver, and during
one of the shocks the ground a little below New Madrid was for a short
time lifted so high as to stop the current of the Mississippi, and cause
it to flow backward. The ground on which this town is built, and the
bank of the river for fifteen miles above it, subsided permanently about
eight feet, and the cemetery of the town fell into the river. In the
neighboring forest the trees were thrown into inclined positions in
every direction, and many of their trunks and branches were broken. It
is affirmed that in some places the ground swelled into great waves,
which burst at their summits and poured forth jets of water, along with
sand and pieces of coal, which were tossed as high as the tops of trees.
On the subsidence of these waves, there were left several hundreds
of hollow depressions from ten to thirty yards in diameter, and about
twenty feet in depth, which remained visible for many years afterward.
Some of the shocks were vertical, and others horizontal, the latter
being the most mischievous. These earthquakes resulted in the general
subsidence of a large tract of country, between seventy and eighty miles
in length from north to south, and about thirty miles in breadth from
east to west. Lakes now mark many of the localities affected by the
earthquake movements. It is only to the fact that this country was then
very thinly settled that a great loss of life was avoided.

New Madrid, Missouri, was a central point of this earthquake, the
shocks there being repeated with great frequency for several months.
The disturbance of the earth, however, was not confined to the United
States, but affected nearly half of the western hemisphere, ending
in the upheaval of Sabrina in the Azores, already described. The
destruction of Caracas, Venezuela, with many thousands of its
inhabitants, and the eruption of La Soufriere volcano of St. Vincent
Island were incidents of this convulsion. Dr. J. W. Foster tells us that
on the night of the disaster at Caracas the earthquake grew intense at
New Madrid, fissures being opened six hundred feet long by twenty broad,
from which water and sand were flung to the height of forty feet.

The most destructive of earthquakes in our former history was that which
visited Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886, the injury caused by it
being largely due to the fact that it passed through a populous city.
As it occurred after many of the people had retired, the confusion and
terror due to