the profundity of some of the openings which did not close in again." There is a fine description of the Earthquake and this melancholy result, in Cowper's Task, which we shall quote. Alas for Sicily! rude fragments now Lie scatter'd where the shapely column stood. Her palaces are dust. In all her streets The voice of singing and the sprightly chord Are silent. Revelry, and dance, and show Suffer a syncope and solemn pause; While God performs upon the trembling stage Of his own works his dreadful part alone. The rocks fall headlong, and the valleys rise, The rivers die into offensive pools, And charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross And mortal nuisance into all the air. What solid was, by transformation strange, Grows fluid; and the fix'd and rooted earth, Tormented into billows, heaves and swells, Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl Sucks down its prey insatiable. Immense The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs And agonies of human and of brute Multitudes, fugitive on every side, And fugitive in vain. The sylvan scene Migrates uplifted; and, with all its soil Alighting in far distant fields, finds out A new possessor, and survives the change. Ocean has caught the frenzy, and upwrought To an enormous and o'erbearing height, Not by a mighty wind, but by that voice Which winds and waves obey, invades the shore With force resistless. Where now the throng, That press'd the beach, and, hasty to depart, Look'd to the sea for safety? They are gone, Gone with the refluent wave into the deep-- A prince with half his people! You will find a great many other astonishing effects of this Earthquake described in Mr. Lyell's Work on Geology, from which I have extracted some parts of the preceding account. VOLCANOES. The word Volcano comes from Vulcan, the name of the God of fire in the Greek mythology. You have read how the poets used to represent him as engaged underground in forging thunderbolts for Jupiter, and other work of the same kind, with the assistance of his one-eyed journeymen the Cyclopes. They feigned that Volcanoes were the chimneys of his workshops, and that when an eruption took place he was busy forging his iron. Others pretended that when Jupiter had overcome the giants named Titans, who had rebelled against him, instead of putting them in the stocks, he placed mountains upon them, and that when the imprisoned monsters turned themselves from one side to the other, earthquakes and eruptions were the consequence. However, we don't believe any of these stories now, neither perhaps did the ancients. But you must learn all about them and their meaning, (where they have any,) from your schoolmaster. My business now is to tell you what Volcanoes are.