Just one hundred years ago, which was fifty years before the time of the visit of Humboldt, two Capuchin friars came to preach at the estate which occupied the beautiful valley of Jorullo. This valley was situated between two basaltic ridges, and was watered by two small streams of limpid water, the San Pedro and the Cuitamba. These small parallel rivers furnished an abundant supply of water, which was well employed in irrigating flourishing sugar and indigo plantations. These Capuchins, not having met with a favorable reception at the estate of San Pedro, poured out the most horrible imprecations against the beautiful and fertile plains, foretelling that, as the first consequences of their curse, the plantation would be swallowed up by flames rising out of the earth, and that afterward the neighboring mountains would forever remain covered with snow and ice. After denouncing the curse, the two holy men went on their way. ERUPTION OF JORULLO. On the night of the 28th and 29th of September, 1759, horrible subterraneous noises were heard, which had been preceded by slight shocks of an earthquake since the June preceding. The affrighted Indians fled to the Aquasareo, and soon thereafter a tract of land twelve miles square, which now goes by the name of the "evil land" (_mal pais_), rose up in the form of a bladder, and boiled, and seethed, and bubbled like a caldron of pudding, shooting up columns of fire from ten thousand orifices. Sometimes a number of orifices would unite into one vast crater, and vomit forth such a column of fire as was never before seen by human eyes since the time when "the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace." Intelligent witnesses assured Humboldt that flames were seen to issue forth, which, from a surface of more than a mile square, cast up fragments of burning rock to a prodigious height. The two small rivers were swallowed up, and their decomposed waters added fuel to the flames, which burned for many months with a fierceness that is indescribable. Such is the origin of the volcano of Jorullo, in the State of Michoican, and such is the pretended consequence of a curse pronounced by Capuchin monks upon one of the most beautiful estates in the country; and for generations since, the dread of incurring the displeasure of strolling vagabond monks has rested like a blight upon the common people; and yet this is but one of the thousand ways by which the Mexican priesthood play upon the credulity of the ignorant in a country where convulsions of nature are matters of almost ordinary occurrence. Every extraordinary event in nature is ascribed to the exercise of supernatural power on the part of the clergy or the most holy images of the Church.