122 Reviews — Prof, Phillips's and Mr. J. Logan LoUey^s 



also abundaiit. Since the complete subjugation of the country by 

 the Eussians in 1864, efforts have been made, with more or less 

 success, to develop the resources of this interesting region, so full of 

 relics of the early races of mankind, and so rich in classical 

 reminiscences. 



laZEVIZE^VvrS. 



I. — Vesuvius. By J. Phillips, M.A., etc. Printed at the Claren- 

 don Press, Oxford, 1869. 

 11. — Mount Vesuvius, etc. By J. Logan Lobley, F.G.S. Stan- 

 ford, 1868. 



THE past year has been signalized by a more than ordinary 

 activity in the subterranean phenomena of seismic and volcanic 

 disturbance. And hence, perhaps, has arisen a more general desire 

 for information on these subjects to which we owe the two publica- 

 tions of which the titles are given above. 



The work of Professor Phillips is, as might be expected, by far 

 the most scientific and authoritative. It forms the substance of 

 lectures delivered before the University after his return from a visit 

 to Naples in the spring of last year, and is illustrated by numerous 

 woodcuts, chiefly from the Professor's own pencil ; others being 

 reduced copies of authentic drawings, or engravings of earlier dates. 

 Its contents are aiTanged in a threefold division. The first, con- 

 taining a history of the moxmtain called Vesuvius, and its successive 

 eruptions, by far fuller and more complete than any to be found in 

 the works of Hamilton, Lyell, Daubeny, or the other writers on 

 the subject. The second arranges the main facts and phenomena 

 which have been observed in and around Vesuvius in a settled order. 

 The third attempts the interpretation of these observations by 

 reference to the physical and chemical laws of nature, giving, in 

 fact, the Professor's view of the character and origin of volcanoes in 

 general. 



The first recorded eruption of the mountain, is that of a.d. 79, so 

 graphically described in the well-known letter of Pliny the younger, 

 relating to the death of his uncle, and to which catastrophe the cities 

 of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabige, overwhelmed by accumula- 

 tion of ejected ashes, owed their destruction. 



By the explosions of this eruption one half of the circumference of 

 the old crater, which more than a century before had sheltered the 

 banditti of Spartacus, was blown into the air ; the remaining seg- 

 ment still forming the hollow semi-cone called Somma. The author 

 justly, as we think, supposes that before the formation of this early 

 crater, the slopes of Somma were continued all around up to a single 

 conical summit, probably 3,000 or 4,000 feet higher than the 

 present mountain. The subsequent eruptions, which have con- 

 tinued with more or less intermission to the present day — quiescent 

 intervals lasting sometimes for centuries, at others only for a few 

 years or months — have raised the existing cone of Vesuvius in the 

 centre of the old crater, of which the western border remains only 



