VESUVIUS IN ERUPTION 65 



to " light his cigar." In fact, a very small quantity of 

 molten lava was at that time flowing from the side of the 

 ash-cone, about 100 ft from its summit, and this gave a 

 most picturesque effect as we watched it from our balcony 

 high up on Pausilippo, when the sun set. It was a 

 friendly sort of beacon, far away on the commanding 

 mountain's top, which was answered by the lighting up 

 of a thousand lamps along the coast, and by innumerable 

 flaming faggots in the fishermen's boats moving across 

 the bay, drawing to their light strange fishes, to be im- 

 paled by the long tridents of the skilful spearmen. That 

 little beacon light on Vesuvius increased in volume in the 

 course of three weeks, and was supplemented by other 

 flaming streams and by showers of red-hot stones from 

 the crater. This small " eruption " was the precursor by 

 six months of the great eruption of the end of April 1872, 

 and I spent a night on Vesuvius during its progress, and 

 looked into the crater from which the glowing masses of 

 rock were being belched forth. 



Not long before I went, in 1871, to Naples I had spent 

 some weeks in visiting the extinct volcanoes of the 

 Auvergne and of the Eiffel, and I was eager to examine 

 the still living Vesuvius. In the first week of October I 

 made an excursion to the crater of Vesuvius in company 

 with the son of a Russian admiral, whose name, " Popoff," 

 was under the circumstances unpleasantly suggestive. 

 We examined some black slaglike masses of old lava- 

 streams, and struggled up the loose sandy ash-cone (there 

 was no " funicular " in those days), and prodded with our 

 sticks the few yards of molten lava which emerged from 

 the side of the cone about 100 ft. from the summit. 

 On Nov. i my friend Anton Dohrn (who was then 

 negotiating with the Naples Municipality for a site in 

 the Villa Nazionale on which to erect the great Zoological 

 Station and Aquarium, now so well known) was with me 

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