establishment of a Portuguese empire in India and Africa. From 1580 to 1640 Lisbon was a provincial town under Spanish rule, and it was from this port that the Spanish Armada sailed in 1588. In 1640 the town was captured by the duke of Braganza, and the independence of the kingdom restored. For many centuries the city had suffered from earthquakes, and on the 1st of November 1755 the greater part of it was reduced almost in an instant to a heap of ruins. A tidal wave at the same time broke over the quays and wrecked the shipping in the Tagus; fire broke out to complete the work of destruction; between 30,000 and 40,000 persons lost their lives; and the value of the property destroyed was about £20,000,000. The shock was felt from Scotland to Asia Minor. Careful investigation by Daniel Sharpe, an English geologist, has delimited the area in and near Lisbon to which its full force was confined. Lisbon is built in a geological basin of Tertiary formation, the upper portion of which is loose sand and gravel destitute of organic remains, while below these are the so-called Almada beds of yellow sand, calcareous sandstone and blue clay rich in organic remains. The Tertiary deposits, which altogether cover an area of more than 2000 sq. m., are separated near Lisbon from rocks of the Secondary epoch by a great sheet of basalt. The uppermost of these Secondary rocks is the hippurite limestone. It was found that no building on the blue clay escaped destruction, none on any of the Tertiary deposits escaped serious injury, and all on the hippurite limestone and basalt were undamaged. The line at which the earthquake ceased to be destructive thus corresponded exactly with the boundary of the Tertiary deposits. At the beginning of the 19th century the French invasion, followed by the removal of the court to Rio de Janeiro, the Peninsular War, the loss of Brazil and a period of revolution and dynastic trouble, resulted in the utter decadence of Lisbon, from which the city only recovered after 1850 (see PORTUGAL: _History_). BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Every book which deals with the topography, trade or history of Portugal as a whole necessarily devotes a portion of its space to the capital; see PORTUGAL: _Bibliography_. The following treat more exclusively of Lisbon: A. Dayot, _Lisbonne_ (No. ix. of the "_Capitales du monde_" series) (Paris, 1892); Freire de Oliveira, _Elementos para a historia do municipio de Lisboa_ (9 vols., Lisbon, 1885-1898); J. de Castilho, _Lisboa antiga_ (7 vols., Lisbon, 1890), and (by the same author) _A Ribeira de Lisboa_ (Lisbon, 1893). FOOTNOTE: [1] This figure represents the population of a smaller area than that of modern Lisbon, for the civic boundaries were extended by a decree dated the 23rd of December 1886.