Eruption 

 Evidence 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



ers, again, with fish which they had found, 

 and which were to be met with in plenty on 

 the shore, the sea having left them dry for 

 a considerable time. I accompanied Signer 

 Moramaldo to behold the wonderful effects 

 of the eruption. The sea had retired on the 

 side of Baise, abandoning a considerable 

 tract, and the shore appeared almost en- 

 tirely dry, from the quantity of ashes and 

 broken pumice-stones thrown up by the 

 eruption. I saw two springs in the newly 

 discovered ruins; one before the house that 

 was the queen's, of hot and salt water," etc. 

 LYELL Principles of Geology, bk. ii, ch. 23, 

 p. 367. (A., 1854.) 



1O8O. ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS 



Description by Pliny. The first symptom 

 of the revival of the energies of this volcano 

 [Vesuvius] was the occurrence of an earth- 

 quake in the year 63 after Christ, which did 

 considerable injury to the cities in its vicin- 

 ity. From that time to the year 79 slight 

 shocks were frequent ; and in the month of 

 August of that year they became numerous 

 and violent, till they ended at length in an 

 eruption. The elder Pliny, who commanded 

 the Roman fleet, was then stationed at Mi- 

 senum; and in his anxiety to obtain a near 

 view of the phenomena, he lost his life, be- 

 ing suffocated by sulfurous vapors. His 

 nephew, the younger Pliny, remained at 

 Misenum, and has given us, in his " Let- 

 ters," a lively description of the awful scene. 

 A dense column of vapor was first seen ri- 

 sing vertically from Vesuvius, and then 

 spreading itself out laterally, so that its 

 upper portion resembled the head and its 

 lower the trunk of the pine, which character- 

 izes the Italian landscape. This black cloud 

 was pierced occasionally by flashes of fire, as 

 vivid as lightning, succeeded by darkness 

 more profound than night. Ashes fell even 

 upon the ships at Misenum, and caused a 

 shoal in one part of the sea the ground 

 rocked, and the sea receded from the shores, 

 so that many marine animals were seen on 

 the dry sand. The appearances above de- 

 scribed agree perfectly with those witnessed 

 in more recent eruptions, especially those of 

 Monte Nuovo, in 1538, and of Vesuvius in 

 1822. LYELL Principles of Geology, bk. ii, 

 ch. 23, p. 363. (A., 1854.) 



1081. 



Darkness at 



Rain of Ashes 

 Midday. Twenty-four hours 



after the fall of the cone of scoriae [of Vesu- 

 vius, in the eruption of 1822], which was 

 426 feet high, and when the small but nu- 

 merous streams of lava had flowed off, on 

 the night between the 23d and 24th of Octo- 

 ber, there began a fiery eruption of ashes 

 and rapilli, which continued uninterruptedly 

 for twelve days, but was most violent dur- 

 ing the first four days. During this period 

 the explosions in the interior of the volcano 

 were so loud that the mere vibrations of the 

 air caused the ceilings to crack in the palace 

 of Portici, altho no shocks of an earthquake 



were then or had previously been experi- 

 enced. A remarkable phenomenon was ob- 

 served in the neighboring villages of Resina, 

 Torre del Greco, Torre del' Annunziata, and 

 Bosche Tre Case. Here the atmosphere was 

 so completely saturated with ashes that the 

 whole region was enveloped in complete 

 darkness during many hours in the middle 

 of the day. The inhabitants were obliged to 

 carry lanterns with them through the 

 streets, as is often done in Quito during the 

 eruptions of Pichincha. Never had the 

 flight of the inhabitants been more general, 

 for lava streams are less dreaded even than 

 an eruption of ashes, a phenomenon un- 

 known here in any degree of intensity, and 

 one which fills the imaginations of men with 

 images of terror from the vague tradition 

 of the manner in which Herculaneum, Pom- 

 peii, and Stabise were destroyed. HUMBOLDT 

 Views of Nature, p. 365. (Bell, 1896.) 



1O82. ETERNITY, SUGGESTION OF 



Approach and Departure of a Comet 

 Whence and Whither To Us a Journey of 

 Perhaps Eight Million Years. A comet is 

 seen in the far distant depths of space as a 

 faint and scarcely discernible speck. It 

 draws nearer and nearer with continually 

 increasing velocity, growing continually 

 larger and brighter. Faster and faster it 

 rushes on, until it makes its nearest ap- 

 proach to our sun, and then, sweeping around 

 him, it begins its long return voyage into 

 infinite space. As it recedes it grows fainter 

 and fainter, until at length it passes beyond 

 the range of the most powerful telescopes 

 made by man, and is seen no more. It has 

 been seen for the first and last time by the 

 generation of men to whom it has displayed 

 its glories. It has been seen for the first and 

 last time by the race of man itself. Nay 

 more, according to the calculations made by 

 astronomers, the comet has made its first 

 and last visit to the solar system. Of all 

 comets this cannot, indeed, be affirmed; but 

 there are some whose motions will bear no 

 other interpretation. 



Whence came the comet? Trace back its 

 path, and we find no place from which it 

 could have started on its course until we 

 consider the stars in the region of the 

 heavens whence the comet appeared to 

 travel. It would be idle to select any star 

 in particular in that region as probably 

 marking the spot whence the comet started. 

 But suppose we take the brightest, some 

 leading orb, lying at a distance not abso- 

 lutely unmeasurable by man; suppose even 

 that the course of that comet as it ap- 

 proached was such that it might have come 

 from the star Alpha Centauri, which, so far 

 as is known, is the nearest of all in the 

 heavens; then, at a moderate computation, 

 the journey from the neighborhood of that 

 star has not occupied less than eight million 

 years. PROCTOR Expanse of Heaven, p. 134. 

 (L. G. & Co., 1897.) 



