Lye/fs Visits to Vesuvius and Etna 141 



rhinoceros, M. Lartet, 1 a French geologist, had suggested, 

 in explanation of a similar mixture of southern and northern 

 animals, that the former, at a time of greater cold, had 

 reached Spain, where their remains occurred in the upper 

 gravels, and had migrated as far north as the Rhine. 



At the meeting on June I7th, the iO4th, Dr. Falconer, 

 invited by the chairman (Mr. Homer), continued the subject 

 of the Devonshire caves, stating that the owner of the 

 Windmill Hill cave had now agreed to more reasonable 

 terms, and Miss Burdett Coutts had given 50 towards the 

 expense of excavation. 



A memorial to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in favour 

 of retaining the Natural History Collections at the British 

 Museum was read, and was signed by the majority of the 

 members present (eighteen in all). 



At the I05th meeting (Oct. 28th) Sir C. Lyell gave an 

 account of his late visits to Vesuvius 2 and Etna. On the 

 former, during September, he had been able, as the steam 

 and irrespirable gases escaped by the great crater, while the 

 lava was discharged from two flattened dome-shaped cones 

 at its base, to approach within a few feet of the spot from 

 which the lava was issuing. It was white-hot at the moment 

 of its escape, moving at the pace of a fast-flowing river ; 

 in a few yards it changed to a red heat, and then quickly 

 became encrusted with black scoria, and this, as the upper 

 part was the first to solidify, took the shape of loops of rope, 

 with down- pointing curves. Afterwards he spent five weeks 



1 Edouard Lartet (1801-1871), the distinguished French palaeontologist, 

 who, after valuable studies of the Upper Miocene vertebrata in the South 

 of France, and those of the Pliocene Age from Pikermi in Greece, devoted 

 himself to exploring the ossiferous caverns hi the limestone region of the 

 southern Provinces, publishing his first paper in 1860, and then co-operating 

 in Perigord with our late countryman, Henry Christy. The results were 

 published in Reliquiae Aquiianicae, commencing in 1865. They are now 

 given in most of the larger text-books of Geology and Anthropology. 



* A severe and protracted eruption of Vesuvius began on May 2ist, 

 when lava issued from seven new mouths on the north and north-west 

 sides of the cone, one great stream flowing towards and on either side of 

 the Hermitage. A branch of it, which is crossed by the ordinary road up 

 the mountain, is a very good example of the ' corded ' type of lava, black 

 and vitreous. See Life, Letters, and Journal, vol. ii. pages 291-293. 



