VOL. LXXXV.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 505 



that had run into the sea, they surrounded them with their nets, and took them 

 all with ease, and afterwards discovered that they had been stunned by the me- 

 phitic vapour, which at that time issued forcibly from underneath the ancient 

 lava into the sea. I have been assured by many fishermen, that during the force 

 of the late eruption the fish had totally abandoned the coast from Portici to the 

 Torre dell' Annunziata, and that they could not take one in their nets nearer 

 the shore than 2 miles. The divers there, who fish for the ancini (which we 

 call sea eggs) and other shell-fish, also told me, that for the space of a mile from 

 that shore, since the eruption, they have found all the fish dead in their shells, 

 as they suppose either from the heat of the sand at the bottom of the sea, or 

 from poisonous vapours. The divers at Naples complain of their finding also 

 many of these shell-fish, or as they are called here in general terms, frutti di mare, 

 dead in their shells. 



The late sufferers at Torre del Greco, though his Sicilian Majesty offered 

 them a more secure spot to rebuild their town on, are obstinately employed in 

 rebuilding it on the late and still smoking lava that covers their former habita- 

 tions ; and there does not appear to be any situation more exposed to the nu- 

 merous dangers that must attend the neighbourhood of an active volcano than 

 that of Torre del Greco. It was totally destroyed in l631 ; and in the year 

 1737, a dreadful lava ran within a few yards of one of the gates of the town, 

 and now over the middle of it ; yet such is the attachment of the inhabitants to 

 their native spot, though attended with such imminent danger, that of 18000 

 not 1 gave his vote to abandon it. ■ When I was in Calabria, during the earth- 

 quakes in 1783, I observed in the Calabrese the same attachment to native soil ; 

 some of the towns that were totally destroyed by the earthquakes, and which had 

 been ill situated in every respect, and in a bad air, were to be rebuilt ; and yet it 

 required the authority of government to oblige the inhabitants of those ruined 

 towns to change their situation for a much better. 



Upon the whole, having read every account of the former eruptions of Mount 

 Vesuvius, I am well convinced that this eruption was by far the most violent 

 that has been recorded after the two great eruptions of 79 and l631, which were 

 undoubtedly still more violent and destructive. The same phenomena attended 

 the last eruption as the two former above-mentioned, but on a less scale, and 

 without the circumstance of the sea having retired from the coast. I remarked 

 more than once, while I was in my boat, an unusual motion in the sea during 

 the late eruption. On the 18th of June I observed, and so did my boatman, 

 that though it was a perfect calm, the waves suddenly rose and dashed against 

 the shore, causing a white foam, but which subsided in a few minutes. On the 

 15th, the night of the great eruption, the corks that support the nets of the 

 royal tunny fishery at Portici, and which usually float on the surface of the sea, 



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