On the Structure and Origin of Mount Etna. 185 



to form the meshes of a net. May not what has happened in 

 this instance by chance, have once existed as a general rule in 

 the case of certain vegetables of the primitive world ? 



Professor Hausmann, in a paper read before the Gottingen 

 Society, announces the discovery of numerous foot-marks of 

 deer, and also of a quadruped with undivided hoofs, in the tra- 

 vertine or old calcareous tuffa which occurs around Gottingen. 

 In the same remarkable deposit there have been found numerous 

 bones of deer, of small glirine animals, and also of feline species. 

 River shells occur in the tufFa, and, what is worthy of particular 

 notice, also fragments of ancient German clay urns, in which 

 ashes have been found. 



Memoir entitled, " Researches on the Structure and Origin of 

 Mount Etna." By M. L. Elie de Beaumont. 



The chief object of this memoir is to make known, and to 

 explain more exactly than has hitherto been done, the orogra- 

 phical " accidens" which have modified the regularity of the py- 

 ramid of Etna. 



The author presented a map, four views, and a relief model 

 of Etna, constructed in part from his own observations. It will 

 be found, he remarks, that the map, the views, and especially the 

 model in relief, correspond in a very small degree with the poetic 

 image which Pindar has left us of Etna — the pillar of heaven. 

 In the present memoir, the author endeavours to account for this 

 circumstance. 



The great eruptions of Etna, adds M. de Beaumont, com- 

 mence by shocks of earthquakes, by which the mountain is rent" 

 in meridional planes. The walls of the vents are separated by a 

 greater or less space, — a space which sometimes amounts to se- 

 veral metres. The lava, which bubbles up in the central vent, 

 at last almost always opens for itself a passage, by which it flows 

 out laterally on the flanks of the volcano. 



When the eruption has ceased, the inferior part of each of th^ 

 meridional rents remains filled with lava, which then produces a 



