MEMOIR OF LEOPOLD VON BUCH. 361 



de Moll, we seo tliat Italy appeared to his youthful and enthusiastic imaginntiou 

 a promised laud ; and that though science is always in his thoughts, nothing 

 escapes notice, and all sorts of observations gratify him. If the Albanian hills 

 constrain him to modify the ideas which he had brought with him respecting 

 the insignificance of volcanic effects, yet, in the midst of constantly recurring 

 alarms for the system of his master, he pleases himself with the description of 

 the beauties unfolded before his eyes: "Xature," he exclaims, " seems here 

 inexhaustible in the creation of delights which spring up at every step. Whoever 

 has not seen the sun set in the sea while his rays gild the cupolas of the eternal 

 city, whoever has not watched on Lake Nemi the alternating play of the light, 

 can form no conception of the charm of those regions." A tone such as this 

 reveals the man for whona, during a long career, study and the seductions of 

 travel are to be inseparably linked, and who in research is intent only on that 

 which is exalted and aggrandized by its union with the emotions of the soul. 



Arriving at Rome, he there observes the doubtful traces of extinct volcanoes, 

 and his disquietude increases. "lam lost," he says, "in the contradictions 

 which seem to have been here accumulated. One knows not what to believe, 

 nor even if it is permitted to trust one's own eyes." 



To him Vesuvius had always held out the promise of a revelation. At length, 

 after several delays, he saw it, on the 19th of February, 1799. "I arrived," he 

 tells us, "by way of the flair plains of the Campania; a fog which covered the 

 horizon .suddenly vanished, and before me rose sublime the double peak of Ve- 

 suvius crowned Avith eternal flame. There it is ! was the involuntary cry which 

 an expectation so keen and so often disappointed drew from me ; Avhile the 

 cloud in lifting itself seemed to aspire to unite the vast mountain with the 

 heavens." 



On approaching Naples, the young German, brought into contact ■with a 

 vivacious and impassioned population, felt a natural surprise at the singular 

 contrast which the brisk petulance of the inhabitants of these climates forms 

 Avith the phlegmatic earnestness of his native Germany: "Here," he says, 

 "where language stems scarcely the competent organ of expression, where 

 gesture seems tlie true language, how does everything recall the idea of that 

 mysterious fire which we know only by its effects, and which strikes us in so 

 unexpected a manner." 



Vesuvius, whose mysteries he so earnestly longed to penetrate, baffled him 

 on this occasion with delusive hopes. He brought away little but a presenti- 

 ment of the vast labors which lay before him: "I have seen the' crater and 

 descended it," he writes, "but I have realized nothing but a religious horror 

 which certainly gives me no insight into the connexion of causes and effects." 

 Following the currents of lava, he retraces that which filled Naples with dismay 

 in 1767, as well as the fiery torrent which some years later swept aAvay the 

 town of Torre del Greco and spread far into the sea ; and animated by recitals 

 stsJl impressed with terror, he paints the effects of this fearful unloosening of 

 subterranean forces with a poetic energy which recalls the celebrated letter of 

 the younger Pliny. From this first expedition our young savant was taught to 

 comprehend that the study of strata tranquilly deposited by the waters is not, as 

 was thought at Freyberg, the whole of geology, that nature reveals herself in crises, 

 and it is only at such epochs that we can hope to detect secrets which were 

 otherwise impenetrable. 



Von Buch left Italy, where fire in activity spreads its ravages, only to pass 

 into France, where Auvergne offered him the most suitable of theatres for the 

 study of extinct volcanoes. 



Buffon had seen in volcanoes nothing but a congeries of sulphurs and pyrites 



