Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

other sex. As a proof of the total want of education among the Greek women, I cannot help adding that I have often heard at Constantinople, even from the mouths of those who bore the title of princesses, the grossest language used towards their servants, such as would not be endured among es but from the very lowest dregs of the people. It is not difficult, from this specimen, to form an idea of the charm which such sort of female society presents to Europeans of polished countries.

A belief in sorcery or witchcraft, that great stumbling-block of the human understanding in all ages and climes, is exceedingly prevalent in modern Greece. Anumber of old Sibyls, withered sorceresses of the race known among us by the name of Bohemians or Egyptians, the refuse of Thessaly, a country celebrated in all times for female magicians, are in high repute in every part of the Morea. They explain signs, interpret dreams, and all the delirious wanderings of the imagination. Reverenced, feared, caressed, nothing is done without consulting them; nor is it difficult to conceive how unbounded an empire these impostors obtain over imaginations as ardent, united with minds as little cultivated as characterize the Gre

Cian women.

A young woman wishes to know what sort of a husband she is to have. She consults one of these oracles of fate, who gives her a pie seasoned with mint and other aromatic herbs gathered from the mountains. This she is to cat at night without drinking, and go to bed immediately, first hanging

round her neck, in a little enchanted bag, three flowers, one white, another red, and the third yellow. The next morning she puts her hand into the bag and draws out one of the flowers: if it be the white, she is to marry a young man; if the red, one of a middle age; if the yellow, a widower. She is then to relate what she has dreamt in the night, and from her dreams, the Sibyl draws omens, whether the husband is to be rich, and whether the marriage is to prove happy or not. If the predictions be not accomplished, no fault is ever ascribed to the oracle; either her orders were not exactly observed, or the Evil-eye, has rendered her divinations abortive. This Evileye, the Arimanes of the ancients, is a dæmon the enemy of all happiness, the very name of whom terrifies even the most courageous. According to the Greeks, this spirit or invisible power is grieved at all prosperity, groans at success, is indignant at a plentiful harvest, or at the fecundity of the flocks, murmurs even against heaven for having made a young girl pleasing or handsome. In consequence of so strange a superstition, no one thinks of congratulating another upon having handsome children, and they carefully avoid admiring the beauty of a neighbour's horse, for the Evil-eye would very probably at the same instant afflict the children with a leprosy, or the horses with lameness. The power of this genius even extends to taking away treasures of every kind from those by whom they are possessed. If however, in complimenting the beauty of the chil

dren

dren or the horses, care is taken to talk of garlic or to spit, the charm is broken....

After having shown how much the modern Greeks are given up to superstition, and the degree of debasement to which their minds are reduced by the slavery under which they have so long languished, another feature of their character will appear the more extraordinary; this is the vanity which all have more or less of being distinguished by the most pompous titles. Nothing is heard among them but the titles of archon, prince, most illustrious, and others equally high-sounding; the title of His Holiness is given to their papas. The child accustomed to forget the most endearing of all appellations, the wife forgetting that which she ought most to cherish, salute the father and the husband with the title of Signor, at the same time kissing his hand. This name, which is only a term of submission, is by the pride of the Greeks preferred to all others, for the very reason

that it seems to acknowledge superiority in the person to whom it is addressed.

It is from this sentiment of vanity that those Greeks who have acquired any knowledge of the history of their country, speak with so much pride of the ancient relics still scattered over it. According to the affinity which may be found in their names to any of those celebrated in antiquity, they call themselves the descendants of Codrus, of Phidias, of Themistocles, of Belisarius. The same sentiment leads them to hoard up money, that they may be enabled at last to purchase some situation which shall give them the power of domineering over their brethren; and this achieved, it is by no means unusual to see them become more insolent and tyrannical towards them than the Turks themselves. They justify in this respect but too fully the common saying, that the Turk has no better instrument for inforcing slavery than the Greek.

NATURAL

NATURAL HISTORY.

EARTHQUAKES AND THEIR

CAUSES.

[From A. de Humboldt's personal Narrative of Travels, translated by Helen Maria Williams.]

[ocr errors]

Tis a very old and commonly received opinion at Cumana, Acapulco, and Lima, that a perceptible connection exists between earthquakes, and the state of the atmosphere that precedes these phænomena. On the coast of New Andalusia, the inhabitants are alarmed, when, in excessively hot weather, and after long droughts, the breeze suddenly ceases to blow, and the sky, clear, and without clouds at the zenith, exhibits, near the horizon, at six or eight degrees elevation, the appearance of a reddish vapour. These prognostics are however very uncertain; and when the whole of the meteorological variations, at the times when the Globe has been the most agitated, are called to mind, it is found, that violent shocks take place equally in dry and in wet weather; when the coolest winds blow, or during a dead and suffocating calm. From the great number of earthquakes, which I have witnessed to

the north and south of the equator; on the continent, and in the basin of the seas; on the coasts, and at. 2500 toises height; it appears to me, that the oscillations are generally very independent of the previous state of the atmosphere. This opinion is embraced by a number of enlightened persons, who inhabit the Spanish colonies; and whose experience extends, if not over a greater space of the globe, at least to a greater number of years than mine. On the contrary, in parts of Europe where earthquakes are rare compared to America, natural philophers are inclined to admit an intimate connection between the undulations of the ground, and certain meteors, which accidental- . ly take place at the same epocha. In Italy, for instance, the sirocco and earthquakes are suspected to have some connection; and at London, the frequency of falling stars, and those southern lights, which have since been often observed by Mr. Dalton, were considered as the forerunners of those shocks, which were felt from 1748 to 1756.

On the days when the earth is shaken by violent shocks, the regularity of the horary variations of the barometer is not disturbed un

der

der the tropics. I have verified this observation at Cumana, at Lima, and at Riobamba; and it is so much the more worthy of fixing the attention of natural philosophers, as at St. Domingo, at the town of Cape François, it is asserted that a water barometer was observed to sink two inches and a half immediately before the earthquake of 1770. In the same manner it is related, that, at the time of the destruction of Oran, a druggist fled with his family, because, observing accidentally, a few minutes before the earthquake, the height of the mercury in his barometer, he perceived that the column sunk in an extraordinary manner. I know not whether we can give credit to this assertion: but as it is nearly impossible to examine the variations of the weight of the atmosphere during the shocks, we must be satisfied in observing the barometer before or after these phænoinena have taken place. In the temperate zone, the aurora borealis does not always modify the variation of the needle, and the intensity of the magnetic forces. Perhaps also earthquakes do not act constantly in the same manner on the air that surrounds us.

We can scarcely doubt, that the earth, when opened and agitated by shocks, spreadso ccasionally gaseons emanations through the atmosphere, in places remote from the mouths of volcanoes not extinct. At Cumana, as we have already observed, flames and vapours mixed with sulphurous acid spring up from the most arid soil. In other parts of the same province, the earth ejects water and petroleum. At Riobamba a muddy and inflam mable mass, which is called moya, issues from crevices that close

again, and accumulates into ele vated hills. At seven leagues from Lisbon, near Colares, during the terrible earthquake of the first of November, 1755, flames and a column of thick smoke were seen to issue from the flanks of the rocks of Alvidras, and, according to some witnesses, from the bosom of the sea. This smoke lasted several days, and it was the more abundant in proportion as the subterraneous noise, which accompanied the shocks, was louder.

Elastic fluids thrown into the atmosphere may act locally on the barometer, not by their mass, which is very small, compared to the mass of the atmosphere; but because, at the moment of the great explosions, an ascending current is probably formed, which diminishes the pressure of the air.I am inclined to think, that in the greater part of earthquakes nothing escapes from the agitated earth; and that, where gaseous emanations and vapours take place, they oftener accompany, or follow, than precede the shocks. This last circumstance explains a fact, which seems indubitable, I mean that mysterious influence, in equinoctial America, of earthquakes on the climate, and on the order of the dry and rainy seasons. If the earth generally act on the air only at the moment of the shocks, we can conceive why it is so rare, that a sensible meteorological change becomes the presage of these great revolutions of nature.

The hypothesis according to which, in the earthquakes of Cumana, elastic fluids tend to escape from the surface of the soil, seems confirmed by the observation of the dreadful noise, which is heard

during the shocks at the borders of the wells in the plain of Charas. Water and sand are sometimes thrown out twenty feet high. Similar phænomena have not escaped the observation of the ancients, who inhabited parts of Greece and Asia Minor abounding with caverns, crevices, and subterraneous rivers. Nature, in its uniform progress, every where suggests the same ideas of the causes of earthquakes, and the means by which man, forgetting the measure of his strength, pretends to diminish the effect of the subterraneous explosions. What a great Roman naturalist has said of the utility of wells and caverns is repeated in the New World by the most ignorant Indians of Quito, when they show travellers the guaicos, or crevices of Pichincha.

The subterraneous noise, so frequent during earthquakes, is generally not in the ratio of the strength of the shocks. At Cumana it constantly precedes them, while at Quito, and for a short time past at Caracas, and in the West India Islands, a noise like the discharge of a battery was heard, a long time after the shocks had ceased. A third kind of phænomenon, the most remarkable of the whole, is the rolling of those subterraneous thunders, which last several months, without being accompanied by the least oscillating motion of the ground.

In every country subject to earthquakes, the point where, probably by a disposition of the stony strata, the effects are the most sensible, is considered as the cause and the focus of the shocks. Thus at Cumana the hill of the castle of St.

Antonio, and particularly the eminence on which the convent of St. Francis is placed, are believed to contain an enormous quantity of sulphur, and other inflammable matter. We forget, that the rapidity with which the undulations are propagated to great distances, even across the basin of the ocean, proves, that the centre of action is very remote from the surface of the Globe. From this same cause no doubt earthquakes are not restrained to certain species of rocks, as some naturalists pretend, but all are fitted to propagate the movement. In order to keep within the limits of my own experience, I shall here cite the granites of Lima and Acapulco; the gneiss of Caracas; the mica-slate of the peninsula of Araya; the primitive thonschiefer of Tepecuacuilco, in Mexico; the secondary limestones of the Appennines, Spain and new Andalusia; and finally the trappean porphyries of the provinces of Quito, and Popayan. In these different places the ground is frequently agitated by the most violent shocks; but sometimes in the same rock, the superior strata form invincible obstacles to the propagation of the motion. Thus, in the mines of Saxony, we have seen workmen hasten up affrighted by oscillations, which were not felt at the surface of the ground.

If, in regions the most remote from each other, primitive, secondary, and volcanic rocks, share equally in the convulsive movements of the Globe; we cannot but admire also, that in ground of little extent, certain classes of rocks oppose themselves to the propagation of the shocks. At Cuinana for in

stance,

« ZurückWeiter »