110 Physical Notices of the Bay of Naples, 



buildings, with Stark, Ferrari, and Reichard ; or of the objects 

 of domestic use and ornament removed to the museums, of 

 which a splendid account has been published, in nine volumes 

 folio, under the title of " Antichita di Ercolano.'''' Here we may 

 in vain search for any information of a general description, to 

 be found only in some travels of an older date, such as those 

 of Lalande and Swinburne, which contain more general informa- 

 tion on the extraordinary phenomena of the buried cities, than 

 the passing and unsatisfactory notices of all that Piozzi, Ba- 

 retti, Brydone, Nugent, Douglas, Smith, Walker, and others 

 perfectly innumerable, have brought together, in those volumes 

 which, large as is their collective bulk, are but a mite towards 

 the great desideratum of a truly philosophical and complete 

 description of Italy. Nor have those whose province has been 

 more peculiarly philosophical acquitted themselves better in 

 this respect ; Breislak, whose valuable " Topographia Fisica di 

 Campania'''* was so often quoted in my paper on Vesuvius, bare- 

 ly mentions as objects in the topography of the bay these re- 

 markable victims of volcanic agency, nor gives us a word of 

 that information which, in a work approaching in its nature to 

 the present " Notices," we might have expected. Spallanzani, 

 one of the few native geologists of Italy, in his four volumes 

 devoted to the natural history of the two Sicilies, hardly 

 mentions the names of Herculaneum or Pompeii ; and Delia 

 Torre, in his History of Vesuvius, though obliged in the 

 course of his details to allude cursorily to the subject, is singu- 

 larly trifling in his notices, which he frequently repeats in al- 

 most the same terms in the ceurse of his work. 



On the whole, our most satisfactory guide is Hamilton, in 

 his Campi Phlegrcei; yet how meagre and confined is the view 

 he gives of the subject ; how short his statements ; how incom- 

 plete his general views ; and what a deficiency in many of the 

 facts we would wish to be possessed of. Among the desiderata 

 et desideranda in our present subject, we may consider the in- 

 vestigation of the ancient sea line, extending from the modern 

 Resina to Castel-a-mare ; the enumeration of the strata which co- 

 ver Herculaneum ; and the results relative to the ancient con- 

 dition of Stabiae which its excavation must have illustrated, but 

 which we shall presently see is even now a matter of great de- 



