Theory of the Earth

for ever, and thus the system of interchanging the place of sea and land upon this globe might be frustrated. It is only meant to affirm, that the quantity which those rocks, or that coast, have diminished from the period of our history, has either been too small a thing for human observation, or, which is more probable, that no accurate measurement of the subject, by which this quantity of decrease might have been ascertained, had been taken and recorded. It must be also evident, that a very small operation of an earthquake would be sufficient to render every means of information, in this manner of mensuration, unsatisfactory or precarious.

PLINY says Italy was distant from Sicily a mile and a half; but we cannot suppose that this measure was taken any otherwise than by computation, and such a measure is but little calculated to afford us the just means of a comparison with the present distance. He also says, indeed, that Sicily had been once joined with Italy. His words are: " Quondam BRUTIO agro cohaerens, mox interfuso mari avulsa *." But all that we can conclude from this history of PLINY is, that, in all times, to people considering the appearances of those two approached coasts, it had seemed probably, that the sea formed a passage between the two countries which had been once united; in like manner as is still more immediately perceived, in that smaller disjunction which is made between the island of Anglesey and the continent of Wales.

THE port of Syracuse, with the island which forms the greater and lesser, and the fountain of Arethusa, the water of which the ancients divided from the sea with a wall, do not seem to be altered. From Sicily to the coast of Egypt, there is an uninterrupted course of sea for a thousand miles; consequently, the wind, in such a stretch of sea, should bring powerful waves against those coasts. But, on the coast of Egypt, we find the rock on which was formerly built the famous tower of Pharos;

* Lib. 3. cap.8.

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