VOL. IV.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 857 



copper mine at Herrngroundt or the gold mine at Chremnitz. And in the 

 silver trinity mine by Schemnitz, I passed quite under a great hill, and came 

 out on the other side. At Windschach mine by Schemnitz they showed me 

 the place where five men and a gentleman of quality were lost; for which reason 

 they have now placed a tube there. The like they place over all doors and over 

 all ways, where they dig right on for a great space, and have no passage through. 

 At Chremnitz they told me, that 28 men had been killed at one time in 4 

 cuniculi, 7 in each ; and in the sinking of Leopold's pit, which is 1 50 fathoms 

 deep, they were much troubled with damps, which they remedied in this 

 manner : 



They fixed a tube to the side of the schacht or pit, from the top to the bot- 

 tom ; and that not proving sufficient, they forced down a broad flat board, 

 which covered or stopped the pit, or couched very near the sides of it, on all 

 sides but where the tube was ; and so forced out all the air in the pit through 

 the tube : which work they were forced often to repeat. And now they having 

 divers other passages into it, the air is good and sufficient : and I was drawn up 

 through it without the least trouble in breathing. 



But besides this mischief from poisonous exhalations, stagnation of the air, 

 or water impregnated with mineral spirits, they sometimes perish by other ways. 

 For there being in these mines an incredible mass of wood to support the pits 

 and the horizontal passages, (the putei and cuniculi) in all places but where it is 

 rocky, men are sometimes destroyed by the wood set on fire. And in the gold 

 mine at Chremnitz the wood was once set on fire by the carelessness of a boy, 

 and 50 miners smothered thereby; who were all taken out but one. He was 

 afterwards found to be dissolved by the vitriol water^ nothing escaping either of 

 fiesh or bones but only some of his clothes. 



A Chronological Account of tlie several Burnings or Eruptions of 

 Mount Mtna.^ N" 48, p. 967. 



To pass by what is related by Berosus, Orpheus, and other less credible 

 authors, about the eruptions of this mountain, both at the time of the expedi- 

 tion of the Ionian colonies into Sicily, and that of the Argonauts, which latter 

 was in the 12th century before the Christian account ; we shall first take notice 

 of that which happened at the time of the expedition of ^neas, who being 

 terrified by the fire of this then burning mountain, left that island ; whereof 

 Virgil, I. 3. ujEneid. gives a notable description. 



* In the future volumes of the Transactions we shall meet with several other accounts of this 

 volcano, as vol. 4, 4-1, and 61. 



