86 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



the valley of the Riviere Blanche and overwhelmed the sugar 

 factory of M. Guerin, burying the owner and his wife and 

 twenty-five employees. On May 8, at ten minutes to eight 

 in the morning, a blast, blown as if from a funnel, and directed 

 immediately on to the town of Saint Pierre, scorched and killed 

 every living being, with the exception of two men, who was 

 within the city, to the number of twenty-six thousand. The area 

 of total destruction was quite narrow, but all the country to the 

 west and south was scorched, though many people escaped who 

 were within this outer zone. Other eruptions occurred on 

 May 26, June 9, July 9 and 11. On August 30, after a period 

 of quiet during which the residents around the mountain were 

 beginning to become reassured and the fugitives to return, a 

 second blast, as sudden and fierce as the first, was blown out, 

 directed this time to the south and east, which destroyed a new 

 area of country. Heilprin had actually visited the crater on the 

 previous day and was on the margin of the cloud when the blast 

 occurred. It is the nature of this blast which is of the utmost 

 interest ; the shower of ashes which preceded it and the 

 torrential rain due to the violent disturbance of the atmo- 

 sphere, which washed down this ash and covered everything 

 with a slimy coating of grey ash, are phenomena which are 

 well known from other volcanoes in their explosive stage. 



Pliny, Epistola XX., describes a similar blast in the eruption 

 of Vesuvius in 79 a.d., an eruption of a volcano likewise starting 

 activity after a lengthy period of quiescence : " Ab altero latere 

 nubes atra et horrenda ignei spiritus tortis vibratisque discursibus 

 rnpta in longas flammarum figuras dehiscebat ; fulguribus illce 

 et similes et majores erant," which we may translate, with the 

 accounts of the eye-witnesses of the Mont Pelee eruption to 

 guide us : " From the other side a black and terrible cloud — 

 the spirit of fire— belched forth with whirling and quivering 

 offshoots, and rent with long trails of flame like flashes of 

 lightning, only broader." Earl Orrery in his translation renders 

 spiritus ignei as " charged with combustible matter," but the 

 sense seems to be more the "essence" or "soul of fire"; the 

 descriptions of those who breathed this "spirit of fire" and 

 the condition of the bodies both at Pompeii and Saint Pierre 

 seems to point to something more than combustible matter or 

 even heat. 



Two people escaped from the area of all but total destruction. 



