92 Mr Forbes's Physical Notices of the Bay of Naples. 



ing ten, twenty, or thirty paces, as their courage lasted. Yet 

 to such inaccurate observers is Italy still indebted for her illus- 

 tration ; and the absurd tales of Custode and Valets-de-Place, 

 are pawned off upon the credulous world as the results of 

 laborious research and acute observation ! 



" At the bottom of the bay " says the sagacious Swinburne, 

 who probably never attempted to enter the stove, " and at 

 the foot of the steep rocks which serve as a foundation to the 

 ruins called Nero''s House, are some dark caves of great depth, 

 leading to the hottest of all vapour-baths ; nobody can re- 

 main long in them, or indeed penetrate to the end without an 

 extraordinary degree of strength and resolution. The springs 

 at the bottom of the grotto are so hot as to boil an egg hard, 

 almost instantaneously.''^ 



" In one of these grottos,'^ says the would-be philosophic 

 Ferber, '^ which is obliquely running into the rock, the heat 

 is so intolerable, that naked people, in two minutes, distil with 

 sweat. The heat stopped my breath, and I could not go in 

 them above thirty paces. Distant 130 paces from the en- 

 trance is a hot aluminous water about one palm deep, which 

 hardens eggs in a moment.'''' 



The more observant and accurate Lalande, while he ex- 

 presses himself not ignorant of the great heats which have 

 been supported in artificial experiments, gives this rather over- 

 strained account. " La chaleur de les souterrains est si grande, 

 qu'au bout de dix pas on est, pour ainsi dire, suffoque, et il 

 faut de rhabitude et de la force pour aller plus loins ; les pay- 

 sans y vont avec facilite, mais ils sont presque nuds, et ils re- 

 viennent au bout de deux minutes, tous couverts de sueur, le 

 visage aussi inflamme que s'ils avoient ete dans un four." — 

 " Ce n'est pas sans peine et sans danger," says Orloff, * 



rather Bulifon,) Roraanelli, and perhaps the authors of the " Voyage," 

 can be inferred to have reached the hot spring. It is not even al- 

 luded to by Spallanzani, and many other writers I have consulted upon 

 this part of Italy. There is a curious work I have not elsewhere mention- 

 ed, in the Advocates* Library, giving some account of the Stufe di Tritoli, 

 entitled " Synopsis eorum quae de Balneis aliisque Miraculis Puieolanis 

 scripta sunt. Auct. Jo. Fran. Lombardo, Neapolitano." Venetiis, mdlvi. '■ 

 small 4to. 



• Memoires sur Naples, v. 343. 



