23 NOVEMBER 1867, Page 3

The intelligence received last Saturday,—through the very un- safe channel

of a telegram to the New York Herald,—that Tortola, the chief of the Virgin Islands, one of our West Indian possessions, had been submerged in the convulsion of the 29th October which was at once tornado and earthquake, seems to be an extravagant fable. But it was at least half believed in London for two or three days, and gave a greater shock to the imaginations of men than any story of natural convulsions had done since the earthquake of Lisilon. Though no estimate of its population exceeded 10,000, and Lisbon lost 60,000 inhabitants, there was something even more striking to the imagination of men in the total disappearance of an island of some 48 square miles beneath the sea,—like a ship going down with all hands on board, —than-in the mere ruin even of a great city. It was possible ; for the soil of large tracts of coast in India has risen and fallen many -feet within the memory of living men, and small islands, if shaken by .earthquake at all, are usually liable to much severer convulsions than continents. But the sudden and complete extinction by the sea of a settlement of human beings,—a settlement of two hundred years' life, even under British rule,—and without any soul left to tell the tale, or any possible means of arriving at the story of the cata- strophe, seemed an event completely unparalleled in history. The doctrine of continuity in all Nature's doings has never received such a frightful check as it would have done from this gaping of the sea to swallow a British colony whole, with all its appurtenances of civilization, had it proved true. Why should not the Isthmus of Panama itself have gone next, and the Atlantic mingled its waters with the Pacific, with Heaven knows what results? Almost anything seemed possible, if that were. Fortu- nately, however, though we have no direct news from Tortola later than the great hurricane of the 29th October, it does not seem that it had lost even so many lives as were lost at St. Thomas's. The New York Herald has for once thrown up a news- inventor of genius, one who can imagine a truly sensational event, without passing the bounds of tropical possibilities.