POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



565 



Nola 



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Fig. 4. Attempted Restoration of the Parthenopian Volcano as it appeared in 

 Strabo's Time. After Pellegrino, 1651. (The site 01'Veseri is conjectural.) 



The problem of the geologist is to determine the past condition of 

 things from what he is able to find out from the present. Nevertheless, 

 the tendency of popular opinion has been to subordinate geologic to 

 documentary evidence, and the majority of standard works continue to 

 uphold the view that Vesuvius proper was non-existent at the time 

 Herculaneum and Pompeii were overwhelmed. As positive a statement 

 of this view as any is the following, from Professor Phillips' excellent 

 work on ' Vesuvius ' : 



Somma, the broken crest of a greater and earlier volcanic crater, has been 

 unmoved in place, unchanged in form and height, through eighteen centuries; 

 a grand and awful fragment left after the poetic ' struggle of earth and sky,' 

 and full of peculiar records of the combat. Vesuvius, born of Somma, and 

 seated within the encircling grasp of its parent, is a variable heap thrown up 

 from time to time, and again, not seldom, by a greater effort of the same force, 

 tossed away into air. . . . Thus two classes of forms arise in the history of 

 Vesuvius: one may be called the old or Somma form, left after violent and 

 exhaustive efforts of the volcano; the other the new form, in which Vesuvius 

 takes a place unrecorded in ancient history (p. 174). 



Equally confident is the tone assumed by Professor Judd, in his 

 volume on ' Volcanoes/ in the International Science Series : 



Nothing is more certain than the fact that the Vesuvius upon which the 

 ancient Romans and the Greek settlers of southern Italy looked, was a moun- 

 tain differing entirely in its form and appearance from that with which we are 

 familiar. The Vesuvius known to the ancients was a great truncated cone, 

 having a diameter at its base of eight or nine miles, and a height of about 



