312 Contributions to Physical Geography. 



It is a question here, whether the water of the sea also has 

 an agency in this great phenomenon. Many of the eruptions 

 have been attended with prodigious inundations down the sides 

 of ^tna : these floods Recupero and other writers maintain 

 to have been sea water thrown up by the volcano ; and as a 

 proof, it is alleged that shells have been deposited. But water 

 thus raised from the deep through a fiery channel would have 

 come out in the state of steam, and, instead of flowing down in 

 torrents along the earth, would have gone up into the air and 

 caused no inundation. The shells, too, calcined into lime and 

 immediately dissolved by the water, would have wholly disap- 

 peared before they reached the mouth of the volcano. These 

 great floods are very naturally explained by the melting of snow 

 upwards of ten feet deep before a stream of lava. The water 

 of the sea, though not thrown up, may still have an agency in 

 kindling the fires of the volcano ; and it certainly is a remark- 

 able circumstance, that most volcanoes are situated near the 

 sea or under it ; yet too much water would soon extinguish 

 the fire it had kindled, therefore the theory is in every way at- 

 tended with great difficulties. The height, often immense, at 

 which the craters of volcanos are found, is no argument 

 against the great depth of their burning recesses ; on the con- 

 trary, volcanic mountains being formed of ejected matters, their 

 height is the measure of that depth. The simultaneous earth- 

 quakes in Calabria and Sicily just before great eruptions of 

 ^tna, and the simultaneous eruptions of that volcano and 

 Stromboli, scarcely leave any doubt of a communication exist- 

 ing under sea and land to Calabria, to the Lipari islands, and 

 very probably to Vesuvius or farther. 



The greatest part of the coast south-west of ^Etna consists 

 of lava which in times long anterior to all historical records 

 ran down its sides. The dates of only two of the eruptions 

 which produced the lava are known, that of the 96th Olym- 

 piad, and another, 122 years before Christ. Recupero esti- 

 mates the quantity of volcanic matter ejected in the year 1669 

 alone (a memorable one indeed,) at ninety-four millions of 

 cubic passi^ (a passo is five feet,) equal to 11,750,000,000 

 cubic feet. Now that mass of solid matter would build nearly 

 a dozen such cities as London, supposing it to consist of 



