THE GUATEMALAN EARTHQUAKES 209
canal of Nicarauga. Coseguina could have filled up ten times
in one hour a canal prism which the contractors, with all their
boasted labor-saving devices and the employment of tens of thous-
ands of hands, would require-eight years to excavate.
Another active volcano, with its last eruption as recent as
1883, dominates the island in Lake Nicaragua which every ship
will skirt on the passage from Greytown to Brito. . This is Mount
Ometepe. On the same island is a second volcanic peak, that of
Madera. In 1844, nine years after the explosion of Coseguina,
occurred the great earthquake which destroyed the city of Rivas,
near the Pacific shore, and wrought great damage even at Grey-
town, a hundred and fifty miles away on the Atlantic side. The
line surveyed for the Nicaragua canal between the lake and Brito
runs only five miles from Rivas and has its Atlantic terminus at
Greytown.
PANAMA EARTHQUAKES
The danger of such convulsions at Panama is far less. We
are told by M. Bunau-Varilla, a distinguished French engineer, that
in Panama there is within a distance of one hundred and eighty
miles from the canal no volcano, even extinct. The Isthmus there,
since its formation in the early quarternary period, before man
appeared on the earth, has not been modified. It lies in an “ angle
of stability,” so called by seismographers. Except for rare and not
very violent seismic vibrations, originating at distant centres, the
Isthmus of Panama has never been affected by volcanic disturb-
ances. One earthquake of some violence, indeed, has occurred
there during the historic period, that of 1621, when the greater
part of Panama city was shaken down. Aside from this the most
destructive earthquake known in the history of Panama was that
of September 7, 1882. It lasted only a minute, but in that time
14