S04 
VQLCANO. 
united again on the south side, and poured 
desolation upon the adjacent country. The 
progress of the torrent was at first at the rate 
of seven miles a day, but it afterwards took 
four days to travel sixteen : wherever it di- 
rected its course, the whole appearance ot 
nature was changed, several hills were form- 
ed in places which were formerly valleys, 
and a large lake was so entirely filled up by 
the melted mass, as not to leave a vestige 
remaining. In its course it descended upon 
a vineyard, belonging to a convent of Je- 
suits, which was formed upon an antient, and 
probably a very thin, layer of lava, with a 
number of caverns and crevices under it. 
The liquid mass entering into these excava- 
tions soon filled them up, and by degrees 
bore up the vineyard, which in a short time, 
to the great astonishment of the spectators, 
began to move away, and was carried by the 
torrent to a considerable distance. In 1770 
some remains of this vineyard were still to be 
seen, but the greater part of it was entirely 
destroved. * 
After destroying several convents, church- 
es/and villages, this fiery current directed its 
course to Catania, where it poured impetu- 
ously over the ramparts, which are near sixty 
feet in height, and covered up five of its 
bastions, with the intervening curtains. After 
laying waste a great part of this beautiful 
city, and entirely destroying several valuable 
remains of antiquity, its further progress was 
stopped by the ocean, over whose banks it 
poured its destructive current. In its course 
from the rent in the mountain, till its arrival 
in the sea, it is said to have totally destroy- 
ed the property of near thirty thousand per- 
sons. Twenty-four years after the fatal erup- 
tion of 1669, a violent earthquake, which 
extended along all the eastern coast, and de- 
stroyed in one hour more than sixty thou- 
sand persons, overthrew the remaining build- 
ings of Catania, and buried a very consider- 
able number of its inhabitants under the ruins 
of their houses and churches. 
The celebrated bishop Berkeley has de- 
scribed an eruption of mount Vesuvius, of 
which lie was a witness in the year 17 17, and 
the reader will find his narrative in the first 
volume of Dr. Goldsmith’s History of the 
Earth and Animated Nature, p. 94. But the 
most complete and philosophical account of 
this formidable phenomenon, a volcanic ex- 
plosion, is that with which sir William Ha- 
milton has favoured the public, in describing 
the dreadful eruption of that mountain in 
1794, and this we shall endeavour to give, as 
nearly as possible, in his own words. 
Sir William begins his narrative with re- 
marking that the frequent slight eruptions of 
lava for some years past had issued from 
near the summit, and ran in small channels 
in different directions down the flanks of the 
mountain, and from running in covered 
channels, had often an appearance as if they 
came immediately out ot the sides of Vesu- 
vius, but such lavas had not sufficient force 
to reach the cultivated parts at the foot of 
the mountain. In the year 1779, the whole 
quantity of the lava in fusion having been 
at once thrown up with violence out of the 
crater of Vesuvius, and a great part of it- fall- 
ing, and cooling on its cone, added much to 
the solidity of the walls of this huge natural 
chimney, and had not of late years allowed 
of a sufficient discharge of lava to calm that 
fermentation, which by the subterraneous 
noises heard at times, and by the explosions 
of scoria? and ashes, was known to exist with- 
in the bowels of the volcano. The erup- 
tions, therefore, of late years, before this last, 
were simply from the lava having boiled over 
the crater, the sides being sufficiently strong 
to confine it, and oblige it to rise and over- 
flow. The mountain had been remarkably 
quiet for seven months before the late erup- 
tion, nor did the usual vapour issue from its 
crater, but at times it emitted small clouds 
of smoke that floated in the air in the 
shape of little trees. It was remarked by 
father Antonio di Petrizzi, a Capuchin friar, 
(who printed an account of the late eruption,) 
from his convent close to the unfortunate 
town of Torre del Greco, that for some days 
preceding this eruption, a thick vapour was 
seen to surround the mountain, about a quar- 
ter of a mile beneath its crater, and it was 
observed by him and others at the same time 
that both the sun and the moon had often an 
unusual reddish cast. 
The water of the great fountain at Torre 
del Greco began to decrease some days be- 
fore the eruption, so that the wheels of a 
corn-mill, wrought by that water, moved 
very slowly ; it was necessary in all the other 
wells of the town and its neighbourhood to 
lengthen the ropes daily, in order to reach 
the water ; and some of the wells became 
quite dry. Although most of the inhabitants 
were sensible of this phenomenon, not one 
of them seems to have been sensible of the 
true cause. Eight days also before the erup- 
tion, a man and two boys being in a vine- 
yard above Torre del Greco (and precisely 
on the spot where one of the new mouths 
opened, whence the principal current of lava 
that destroyed the town issued), were much 
alarmed by a sudden puff of smoke which 
issued from the earth close to them, and was 
attended with a slight explosion. 
Had this circumstance, with that of the 
subterraneous noises heard at Resina for two 
days before the eruption (with the additional 
one of the decrease of water in the wells), 
been communicated at the time, it would 
have required no great foresight to have 
been certain that an eruption of the volcano 
was near at hand, and that its force was di- 
rected particularly towards that part of the 
mountain. 
On the 12th of June 1794, in the morning, 
there was a violent fall of rain, and soon after 
the inhabitants of Resina, situated directly 
over the antient town of Herculaneum, were 
sensible of a rumbling subterraneous noise, 
which was not heard at Naples. 
From the month of January to the month 
of May, the atmosphere had been generally 
calm, and there was continued dry weather. 
In the month of May there was a little rain, 
but the weather was unusually sultry. For 
some days preceding the eruption, the duke 
della Torre, a learned and ingenious noble- 
man, who published two letters upon the sub- 
ject of the eruption, observed by his electro- 
meters, that the atmosphere was charged 
with an excess of the electric fluid, and thus 
it continued for several days during the erup- 
tion. 
About eleven o’clock on the night of the 
12th of June, the inhabitants of Naples were 
all sensible of a violent shock of an earth 
quake ; the undulatory motion was evidently 
from east to west, and appeared to have 
lasted near half a minute. The sky, which 
had been quite clear, was soon after covered 
with black clouds. The inhabitants of the 
townsand villages, which are very numerous 
at the foot of Vesuvius, felt this earthquake 
still more sensibly, and say, that the shock at 
first was from the bottom upwards, after 
which followed the undulation from east to 
west. This earthquake extended all over the 
Campagna Felice ; and the royal palace at 
Caserta, which is fifteen miles from Naples, 
and one of the most magnificent and solid 
buildings in Europe (the walls being eighteen 
feet thick), was shaken in such a manner as 
to cause great alarm, and all the chambef 
bells rang. It was likewise much felt at Be- 
neventum, about thirty miles from Naples; 
and at Ariauo in Puglia, which is at a much 
greater distance ; both these towns, indeed, 
have been often afflicted with earthquakes. 
On Sunday the 15th of June, s-oon after 
ten o’clock at night, another shock of an 
earthquake was felt at Naples, but did not 
appear to be quite so violent as that of the 
12th, nor did it last so long; at the same 
moment a fountain of bright fire, attended 
with a very black smoke and a loud report, 
was seen to issue, and to rise to a great 
height, from about the middle of the cone of 
Vesuvius. Soon after another of the same 
kind broke out at some little distance low'er 
down ; then, as is supposed, by the blowing 
up of a covered channel full of red-hot lava, 
it had the appearance as if the lava had taken 
its course directly up the steep cone of the 
volcano. Fresh fountains succeeded one 
another hastily, and all in a direct line, tend- 
ing, for about a mile and a half, down to- 
wards the towns of Resina and Torre del 
Greco. Sir William Hamilton could count 
fifteen of them, but believes there were others 
obscured by the smoke. It seems probable, 
that all these fountains of fire, from their 
being in such an exact line, proceeded from 
one and the same long fissure down the 
flanks of the mountain, and that the lava and. 
other volcanic matter forced its way out of 
the widest parts of the crack, and formed 
there the little mountains and craters that 
will be described in their proper place. It 
is impossible that any words can give an idea 
of the blazing scene, or of the horrid noises 
that attended this great operation of nature. 
It was a mixture of the loudest thunder, 
with incessant reports, like those from a nu- 
merous heavy artillery, accompanied by a 
continued hollow murmur, like that of the 
roaring of the ocean during a violent storm ; 
and, added to these was another blowing 
noise, like that of the ascending of a large 
flight of sky-rockets, or rather like that which 
is produced by the action of the enormous 
bellows on the furnace of the Carron iron- 
foundry in Scotland. The frequent falling 
of the huge stones and scoria?, which were 
thrown up to an incredible height from some 
of the new mouths, (one of which, having 
been since measured by the abbe Tata, was 
found to be ten feet high, and thirty-five in 
circumference), contributed undoubtedly to 
the concussion of the earth and air. As the 
lava did not appear to have yet a sufficient 
vent, and it was now evident that the earth- 
quakes already felt had been occasioned by 
the air and fiery matter confined within the 
