No part of the world is exempt from sudden calamities of a similar character. The earthquake experienced by the city of Antioch in Syria, in the year 626, destroyed two hundred and fifty thousand people. The great eruption of Mount Etna, in 1669, overflowed fourteen towns, containing from three to four thousand inhabitants each. The stream of lava which issued from the mountain was half a mile wide and forty feet deep, and swept everything before it, until lost in the sea. The earthquake at Lisbon, in 1775, killed sixty thousand persons in six minutes; the shock was felt in Switzerland, in Scotland, in Massachusetts, and on the shore of Lake Ontario. In 1783, a large river in Iceland was sunk into the earth by volcanic action, and entirely obliterated. In 1792, an earthquake in the island of Java sunk a tract of land fifteen miles long and six miles wide, carrying down with it forty small villages. In our own country and in our own neighborhood, in 1811, several islands in the Mississippi River, near New Madrid, were sunk by an earthquake, and the course of the river driven back eighteen miles, causing it to overflow the adjacent lands; about half the county of New Madrid, as well as the village, was submerged. Several new lakes were created, one of which was sixty miles long and several miles wide. The earth's surface rose in undulations like the billows of the sea, and with terrific utterances, opened yawning chasms, from which vast columns of sand and water, and a substance resembling coke, were thrown out. The whole face of the country in that region was materially changed. And, what is a little singular, one of the lakes thus created by the earthquake extended to the river at a point nearly opposite the famous Island No. 10, thus affording a natural canal by which the Union forces in the late civil war approached and took the island. It is not improbable that the entire chain of our great northwestern lakes, from Ontario to Superior, were created by the volcanic collapse of a mountain range that once occupied the same localities. Of this fact there are plausible, if not irresistible, evidences to be seen in the volcanic character of the rocks at various points along the entire coast. Nor can it be very well doubted that subsequent volcanic action has elevated much of the coast into several corresponding ridges, from one to two miles apart, which distinctly mark the successive boundaries of these inland seas.