ABOUT VOLCANOS AND EARTHQUAKES. 15 



riant festoons ! When I visited Somma, to see the 

 country where the celebrated wine, the Lacryma Christi, 

 is grown, it was the festival of the Madonna del Arco. 

 Her church was crowded to suffocation with a hot and 

 dusty assemblage of the peasantry. The fine impalpable 

 volcanic dust was everywhere; in your eyes, in your 

 mouth, begriming every pore ; and there I saw what I 

 shall never forget. Jammed among the crowd, I felt 

 something jostling my legs. Looking down, and the 

 crowd making way, I beheld a line of worshippers crawl- 

 ing on their hands and knees from the door of the 

 church to the altar, licking the dusty pavement all the 

 way with their tongues, positively applied to the ground 

 and no mistake. No trifling dose of Lacryma would be 

 required to wash down what they must have swallowed 

 on that journey, and I have no doubt it was administered 

 pretty copiously after the penance was over. 



(22.) Now I come to consider the manner in which 

 an earthquake is propagated from place to place ; how it 

 travels, in short. It runs along the earth precisely in 

 the same manner, and according to the same mechanical 

 laws as a wave along the sea, or rather as the waves of 

 sound run along the air, but quicker. The earthquake 

 which destroyed Lisbon ran out from thence, as from a 

 centre, in all directions, at a rate averaging about twenty 

 miles per minute, as far as could be gathered from a 

 comparison of the times of its occurrence at different 

 places ; but there is little doubt that it must have been 

 retarded by having to traverse all sorts of ground, for a 

 blow or shock of any description is conveyed through the 



