These depths are a natural consequence of the elevation of mountains; they receive the waters and the earth which flow from the mountains, and the soil is generally very fertile, and are fully inhabited.
The precipices which are between rocks are frequently formed by the sinking of one side, the base of which sometimes gives way more on one side than the other, by the action of the air and frost, which splits and divides them, or by the impetuous violence of torrents. But these abysses, or vast and enormous precipices, found at the summits of mountains, and to the bottom of which it is not possible sometimes to descend, although they are above a mile, or a mile and a half round, have been formed by the fire. These were formerly the funnels of volcanos, and all the matter which is there deficient has been ejected by the action and explosion of these fires, which are since extinguished through a defect of combustible matter. The abyss of Mount Ararat, of which M. Tournefort gives a description in his voyage to the Levant, is surrounded with black and burnt rocks, as one day the abysses of Etna, Vesuvius, and other volcanos, will be,
when they have consumed all the combustible matters they include.
In Plots' Natural History of Staffordshire, in England, a kind of gulph is spoken of which has been sounded to the depth of 2600 perpendicular feet without meeting with any water, or the bottom being found, as the rope was not of sufficient length to reach it.
Greatest cavities and deepest mines are generally in mountains, and they never descend to a level with the plains, therefore by these cavities we are only acquainted with the inside of a mountain, and not with the internal part of the globe itself.
Besides, these depths are not very considerable. Ray asserts that the deepest mines are not above half a mile deep. The mine of Cotteberg, which in the time of Agricola passed for the deepest of all known mines, was only 2500 feet perpendicular. It is evident there are holes in certain places, as that in Staffordshire, or Pool's Hole, in Derbyshire, the depth of which is perhaps greater; but all this is nothing in comparison with the thickness of the globe.
If the kings of Egypt, instead of having erected pyramids, and raised such sumptuous
monuments of their riches and vanity, had been at the same expence to sound the earth, and make a deep excavation to the depth of a league, they, perhaps, might have found substances which would have amply recompensed the trouble, labour, and expence, or at least we should have received information on the matters of which the internal part of the globe is composed, which might have been very useful, and which we at present have not.
But let us return to the mountains; the highest are in the southern countries, and the nearer we approach the equator, the more inequalities we find on the surface of the globe. This is easy to prove, by a short enumeration of the mountains and islands.
In America, the chain of the Cordeliers, the highest mountains of the earth, is exactly under the equator, and extends on the two sides far beyond the tropic circles.