EARTHQUAKE IN SPAIN.
occur every day; and it is only when unusually destructive, like extraordinary tempests, that they attract any attention; so that their being recorded depends even more upon location than upon actual force.
All the phenomena of volcanoes and earthquakes point us to one conclusion: that the earth may in time become as dead and deserted as the moon. The telescope shows the latter to be thickly dotted with volcanic craters, whose immensity, in comparison with those of our own globe, is astounding; yet all are extinct. It is not probable that the interior of our earth is molten; and we have seen that fractures and subsidence, caused by gradual cooling, seem to be the main cause of the local phenomena of volcanoes and earthquakes. As the ages roll on, these weak places may become still higher; and the belt of warm climate will grow narrower and narrower. Cooling at the present rate, 2,500,000,000 years will be necessary to render it as lifeless as the moon.
“As the cooling progresses, a sheet of snow and ice, from north and south, will descend from the mountains upon the table-lands and valleys, driving before it life and civilization, and covering forever the cities and nations that it meets on its passage. All life and human activity will press insensibly toward the inter-tropical zone. The great cities of the world will fall asleep in succession under their eternal shroud. During very many ages, equatorial humanity will undertake arctic expeditions to find again under the ice the place of Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. The sea-coasts will have changed, and the geographical map of the earth will have been transformed. No one will live and breathe, except in the equatorial zone, up to the day when the last family, nearly dead with cold and hunger, will sit on the shore of the last sea, in the rays of the sun, which will thereafter shine here on a dead, cold earth, revolving, like a satellite moon, about a sun unseen by mortal eyes, and distributing to an extinguished planet a useless heat.” So will end the history of our planet and its great disasters.
“All worldly shapes shall melt in gloom,
The sun himself must die,
Before this mortal shall assume
Its immortality!
I saw a vision in my sleep,
That gave my spirit strength to sweep
Adown the gulf of time!
I saw the last of human mold
That shall creation’s death behold,
As Adam saw her prime!
The sun’s eye had a sickly glare,
The earth with age was wan;
The skeletons of nations were
Around that lonely man!
Some had expired in fight—the brands
Still rusted in their bony hands.
In plague and famine some!
Earth’s cities had no sound or tread,
And ships were drifting with the dead,
To shores where all was dumb!