The Two Columns are still often heard of throughout the Mediterranean, and sometimes seen in the shape of the dollar of Charles V., which is superior in value to those of his successors, and is known by the name of _Colonato_. Strange vicissitude! The Phœnician Melcarth’s votive offering become a money-changer’s tale! The story is now ended, and the circle complete. Bright-eyed poetry--strong-handed enterprise, have descended to ambition and solecism, vulgarity and gain, and having begun with virtue idolized, we end with gold become the idol. I have been speculating on the influence exercised by this passage on human events: the physical condition of the globe offers a parallel field. Let us suppose, that the gap had been just wide enough to supply the water lost by evaporation, for which the thousandth part of the present passage would suffice:--the Mediterranean would have been a salt-pan. The yearly deposit would have been an inch, the yearly produce 80 millions of cart loads, or 50,000 times the quantity of earth displaced in constructing the London and Birmingham Railway. Supposing then this evaporation to have gone on since the deluge, the result would be, a field of 750,000 square miles of salt, fifty fathoms thick--that is, the Mediterranean would be a tank of brine, and perhaps we should have a fresh-water ocean outside in lieu of a salt one.[21] This has been prevented by the straits being wide and deep enough to allow an admixture of the waters. In all other geological facts, there are presented subordinate effects only. You may reason from the completeness of the whole, and the adaptation of the parts to a supreme creating Will. But this adjustment of the forms of nature to the use of man, appears less a geological incident than a specimen of animal organization. Going a step further, let us suppose the ocean shut out altogether.[22] What sights should we then have seen? Since the Deluge the evaporation, at the present rate, would have reduced by this time the level 8,000 or 10,000 feet; but in proportion as it sunk, and the shallow borders became dry land, the temperature would rise, and the moisture of the atmosphere diminish. The evaporation would be more and more rapid, and the surface of the Mediterranean might have sunk as far beneath its present level as Mont Blanc soars above it.[23]