214 Dr Charles Daubeny on the 



cularly, to the operations now proceeding about Vesuvius, in 

 Sicily, and in the Lipari Islands, that hypothesis which was 

 first propounded by Sir H. Davy, but which, towards the close 

 of his life, that great chemist, like an unnatural parent, ap- 

 pears to have cast aside. 



And although Dr John Davy, in the Life he has published 

 of his brother, has taken me rather severely to task, for ven- 

 turing to suggest, that this cruel abandonment of his own pro- 

 geny was, on the part of Sir Humphrey, a matter of taste, 

 rather than of deliberate judgment, as though I had almost 

 impeached his moral conduct by attributing to him such a 

 change of sentiment on a scientific question,* yet I am still 

 prepared to contend, that, inasmuch as this illustrious philo- 

 sopher, at the very time when he avowed his preference for 

 a rival theory, acknowledged that the one he had originally 

 advocated was adequate to account for all the phenomena 

 which are known to accompany a volcanic eruption, f the opin- 

 ion he expressed is not entitled quite to the same deference 

 which it would otherwise command, nor to be regarded of 

 sufficient weight to bias us against the reception of the evi- 

 dence which may be offered in support of that hypothesis 

 which I have ventured to espouse. 



In my first visit, then, to Naples, my attention was almost 

 exclusively directed, as that of most travellers is, to the 

 operations of the active, or semi-active volcanoes round about 

 this Capital ; but on my second, I extended my examination 

 to an extinct one in Apulia, situated near the eastern decli- 

 vity of the Apennines, and bearing, as it would seem, the 

 same relation to the Adriatic, which Vesuvius does to the 

 Mediterranean. 



This volcano, known to the ancients as the Mount Vultur, 

 a name which it still retains, preserves to the present day 



* See Davy's Life, vol. ii., pp. 124, 5. 



t Phil. Trans, for 1828, p. 250. " Assuming the hypothesis of the existence 

 of such alloys of the metals of the earths as may burn into lava in the interior, 

 the whole phenomena may be easily explained from the action of the vs^ater of 

 the sea and air upon those metals ; nor is there any fact in any of the circum- 

 stances which I have mentioned in the preceding part of this paper, which can- 

 not be easily explained according to this hypothesis." 



