98 RAMBLES OF A NATURALIST. 



older than the human race, often rise to a height 

 of more than one thousand feet from the base, which 

 is almost entirely composed of recent cheire super- 

 posed upon one another. The hurricane, however, 

 whose violence was now redoubled, soon obliged us 

 to leave our post, and hastening onwards, we passed 

 almost without a moment's pause before the Cisterna, 

 an enormous chasm in shape like an inverted cone, 

 which has opened in the midst of the Piano del Lago. 

 "We at length found shelter behind the Montagnuola 

 where our mules were waiting for us. Three hours 

 afterwards we reached Nicolosi, and after offering 

 our thanks to Doctor Gemellaro, we subscribed our 

 names on his register below the signatures of Leo- 

 pold von Buch*, Elie de Beaumont, Constant Pre- 

 vost, and Adrien de Jussieu. That evening we 

 rested at the house of Abate, and seated round his 

 table, which is the best provided in Sicily, we forgot 

 our fatigues, and thought only of the grand spectacle 

 by which they had been rewarded. After having 

 visited Etna, we are better able to appreciate the 

 enormous power of the forces which are brought into 

 play in this part of the globe, and we no longer 

 regard as exaggerated the recital of those eruptions 



* Leopold von Buch, a foreign associate of the Institute, who 

 died in 1853, was one of the founders of modern geology. The 

 theory of upheavals owes to him some of the most conclusive proofs 

 on which it is based, and he was the first who referred chains of 

 mountains, which were parallel to one another, to contemporaneous 

 upheavals. It is well known how much M. Elie de Beaumont has 

 extended and enlarged these first data. Among the works which 

 Leopold von Buch has left, we may instance as a model for other 

 writers^, Physikalische Beschreibung der Canarischen Insefa. 



