The Lisbon Earthquake.

—The great earthquake which destroyed the city of Lisbon on the 1st of November, 1755, and whose effects were so admirably investigated by the distinguished philosopher Emmanuel Kant, was felt in the Alps, on the coast of Sweden, in the Antilles, Antigua, Barbadoes, and Martinique; in the great Canadian lakes, in Thuringia, in the flat country of Northern Germany, and in the small inland lakes on the shores of the Baltic.

Remote springs were interrupted in their flow—a phenomenon attending earthquakes which had been noticed amongst the ancients by Demetrius, the Callatian.

The hot springs of Toplitz dried up, and returned, inundating everything around, and having their waters coloured with iron ochre.

In Cadiz, the sea rose to an elevation of sixty-four feet, whilst in the Antilles, where the tide usually rises only from twenty-six to twenty-eight inches, it suddenly rose above twenty feet, the water being of an inky blackness.

It has been computed, that, on the 1st of November, 1755, a portion of the earth’s surface four times greater than that of Europe was simultaneously shaken.

As yet there is no manifestation of force known to us, including even the murderous inventions of our own race, by which a greater number of people has been killed in the short space of a few minutes; sixty thousand were destroyed in Sicily, in 1693; from thirty to forty thousand in the earthquake of Riobamba, in 1797, and probably five times as many in Asia Minor and Syria, under Liberius and Justinian the elder, about the years 19 and 526.—Humboldt’s Cosmos.