ifices, the Temple of Serapis being mentioned amongst
the rest, and described as being near or towards the sea, "mare vorsum."
Sir Edmund Head, after studying, in 1828, the topography and antiquities
of this district, and the Greek, Roman, and Italian writers on the
subject, informed me, that at Alexandria, on the Nile, the chief seat of
the worship of Serapis, there was a Serapeum of the same form as this
temple at Puzzuoli, and surrounded in like manner by chambers, in which
the devotees were accustomed to pass the night, in the hope of receiving
during sleep a revelation from the god, as to the nature and cure of
their diseases. Hence it was very natural that the priests of Serapis, a
pantheistic divinity, who, among other usurpations, had appropriated to
himself the attributes of Esculapius, should regard the hot spring as a
suitable appendage to the temple, although the original Serapeum of
Alexandria could boast no such medicinal waters. Signor Carelli[716] and
others, in objecting to these views, have insisted on the fact, that the
worship of Serapis, which we know prevailed at Rome in the days of
Catullus (in the first century before Christ), was prohibited by the
Roman Senate, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. But there is
little doubt that, during the reigns of that emperor's successors, the
shrines of the Egyptian god were again thronged by zealous votaries; and
in no place more so than at Puteoli (now Puzzuoli), one of the principal
marts for the produce of Alexandria.

Without entering farther into an inquiry which is not strictly
geological, I shall designate this valuable relic of antiquity by its
generally received name, and proceed to consider the memorials of
physical changes inscribed on the three standing columns in most legible
characters by the hand of Nature. (See Frontispiece.) These pillars,
which have been carved each out of a single block of marble, are forty
feet three inches and a half in height. A horizontal fissure nearly
intersects one of the columns; the other two are entire. They are all
slightly out of the perpendicular, inclining somewhat to the southwest,
that is, towards the sea.[717] Their surface is smooth and uninjured to
the height of about twelve feet above their pedestals. Above this is a
zone, about nine feet in height, where the marble has been pierced by a
species of marine perforating bivalve--_Lithodomus_, Cuv.[718] The holes
of these animals are pear-shaped, the e