502 PHILOSOPHY OF STORMS. 



wards the place of the eruption, you saw mountains of 

 smoke, part of which was very black, and part very white, 

 rise up to a great height ; and in the midst of the smoke, at 

 times, deep colored flames burst forth with huge stones 

 and ashes, and you heard a noise like the discharge of a 

 number of great artillery. It appeared to me as if Tyhaeus 

 and Enceladus from Ischia and ./Etna, with innumerable 

 giants, or those from the Oampi Phlegrei, (which according 

 to the opinions of some, were situated in this neighborhood,) 

 were come to wage war again with Jupiter. The natural 

 historians may perhaps reasonably say, that the wise poets 

 meant no more by giants, than exhalations, shut up in the 

 bowels of the earth, which, not finding a free passage, open 

 one by their own force and impulse, and form mountains, 

 as those which occasioned this eruption have been seen to 

 do; and methought I saw those torrents of burning smoke 

 that Pindar describes in an eruption of JEtna, now called 

 Mon Gibello in Sicily ; in imitation of which, as some say, 

 Virgil wrote these lines (< Ipse sed horrificis juxta tonat 

 JEtnarmnis" &c. After the stones and ashes with clouds 

 of thick smoke had been sent up by the impulse of the fire 

 and windy exhalation, (as you see in a great cauldron that 

 boils,) into the middle region of the air, overcome by their 

 own natural weight, when from distance the strength they 

 had received from impulse was spent, rejected likewise by 

 the cold and unfriendly region, you saw them fall thick, 

 and, by degrees, the condensed smoke clear away, raining 

 ashes with water and stones of different sizes according to 

 the distance from the place; then by degrees, with the same 

 noise and smoke, it threw out stones and ashes again, and 

 so on by fits. This continued two days and nights, when 

 the smoke and force of the fire began to abate. The fourth 

 day, which was Thursday, at 22 o'clock, there was so 

 great an eruption, that, as I was in the Gulf of Purroli com- 

 ing from Ischia, and not far from Misenum, I saw in a 



