10.

Some, however, may be disinclined to admit this explanation, and would rather have proof from things more manifest to the senses, and which seem to meet us at every turn. Now deluges, earthquakes, eruptions of wind, and risings in the bed of the sea, these things cause the rising of the ocean, as sinking of the bottom causes it to become lower. It is not the case that small volcanic or other islands can be raised up from the sea, and not large ones, nor that all islands can, but not continents, since extensive sinkings of the land no less than small ones have been known; witness the yawning of those chasms which have ingulfed whole districts no less than their cities, as is said to have happened to Bura,342 Bizone,343 and many other towns at the time of earthquakes: and there is no more reason why one should rather think Sicily to have been disjoined from the mainland of Italy than cast up from the bottom of the sea by the fires of Ætna, as the Lipari and Pithecussan344 Isles have been.