52 THILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. |^ANNO 1750. 



viation of pater patriae, are to be considered as part of the inscription sur- 

 rounding the head of Pescennius. 



^ Letter from Robert More, Esq.; containing several Curious Remarks in his 

 Travels through Italy. N° 495, p. 464. 



Mr. M. thinks that travellers do not seem sufficiently to have considered the 

 force and effects of steam, which may be formed by springs of water falling on a 

 vast surface of the fluid lava, but talk too much of sulphur, deceived by the com- 

 plexion of a salt that covers the ground in some places there. In the Solfatara he 

 held a cold iron in the vent, and there ran down it a stream of water. When he 

 went down into the crater on the top of Vesuvius, it was full of smoke. Yet he 

 did not perceive it suffocating but thought it steam. What the guides call sul- 

 phur, when he got it home, ran per deliquium. 



At Arienzo, a village half way to Beneventum, are coppice-woods, from which 

 they make manna. They are of the tree which our gardeners call the flowering 

 ash. The manna is procured by wounding the bark at the season, and catching 

 the sap in cups: it begins to run (they used the scripture term piovere, i. e. to 

 rain) the beginning of August ; and, if the season proves dry, they gather it 5 

 or 6 weeks. The king has a great revenue from it ; yet the tree grows as well 

 in England. 



The fire among the snows, on the Apennines, he imagined to be of the same 

 sort with that about a little well at Brosely* in Shropshire; of which the Society 

 has had an account ; the same as of the foul air sent them from Sir James Low- 

 ther's-|- coal pits ; and the like made by a gentleman with filings of iron and oil 

 of vitriol. The flame when he saw it, was extremely bright, covered a surface 

 of about 3 yards by 1, and rose about 4 feet high. After great rains and snows, 

 they said, the whole bare patch, of about Q yards diameter, flames. The 

 gravel, out of which it rises, at a ver)' little depth, is quite cold. There are 3 

 of these fires in that neighbourhood ; and there was one they call extinct. He 

 went to the place to light it up again, and left it flaming. The middle of the 

 last place is a little hollowed, and had in it a puddle of water : there were strong 

 ebullitions of air through the water. But that air would not take fire; yet what 

 rose through the wet and cold gravel flamed brightly. Near either of these 

 flames, removing the surface of the gravel, that below would take fire from 

 lighted matches. 



• See Pbilos. Trans. N" 482.— Orig. + N* 482, N°442.— Orig. 



