168 
first time that Avitus has been quoted as elucidating either Sidonius, or 
Gregory of Tours, the latter of whom also notices the events, though with 
more brevity. . ... 
u An eminent geologist, forgetting Mr. Lyell’s sensible prohibition against 
entertaining arguments deduced from the silence of historical authorities, and 
zealously anxious to assert the wholesome doctrine of the indefinite antiquity 
of the Auvergne volcanoes, apparently contradicted by the freshness of their 
aspect, exhorts us to reject the evidence of our senses, in order to support a 
theory sustained only by negative proof. He desires us to remark that Julius 
Caesar, who encamped in their vicinity, could scarcely have failed to notice 
them. Yet has not the writer’s enthusiasm caused him to forget that the 
Mont d'Or may have been, like Vesuvius, in a state of temporary quiescence : 
and, in the case of a military commander, whose main object was the narrative 
of his operations, should not the inquirer peculiarly avail himself of Mr. 
Lyell’s caution against drawing inferences from silence ? Again, the geologist 
appeals to the absence of any mention of these volcanoes in the great work 
of the Roman naturalist ; yet here again is not the deduction overstrained 1 
In one chapter of fifteen lines, the elder Pliny enumerates the cities of 
Aquitaine, and does nothing more. Had he possessed a full record of the 
eruptions, would his omission of facts known to him only by report, 
have been more remarkable than the neglect of the younger Pliny to 
notice the fiery burial of the cities which took place in his immediate pre- 
sence ? And if the list of Gaulish eruptions, occurring during the most 
calamitous and disturbed era of the declining empire, when, in Gaul, we have 
literally no historians or chroniclers at all, had been utterly uncommunicated 
in the written page, we could not have been surprised at the absence of the 
information required. 
“ Yet the testimony has been given to us. In this dark and obscure era 
two witnesses rise from the tomb, not men of obscure station or humble 
authority, but individuals of the highest rank, concerning whose character 
and respectability, if such a term can be employed, .we are as fully convinced 
as if they were living at the present day. Sidonius, the poet, the prefect, 
the patrician, the senator, the bishop Alcimus Avitus, equally high in the 
Church, nephew of an emperor, counsellor and friend of Clovis, the founder 
of the Frankish monarchy. These, not recording the events in the studied 
chronicle, or in the technical description of the naturalist, or the exaggera- 
tion of the poet, but in the language of friendship and devotion. Briefly and 
emphatically they advert to transient calamities as the reason for lasting 
gratitude and repentance ; speaking not to strangers who would need any 
elaborate explanations of localities, nor preserving details to satisfy the 
curiosity of posterity, but seeking the comfort and edification of the friends 
and contemporaries whom they addressed, — men who had seen the incan- 
descent streams and showers, heard the subterranean thunder, felt the earth 
shake beneath their feet, knelt before the same altar, uttered the same 
prayers, — the people to whom every word and every expression of the preacher 
brought up in their minds the whole spectacle of the desolation which had 
mercifully passed away.” 
The able Reviewer here appends the following foot-note : 
“ The observation in our text respecting the claim to ‘ indefinite antiquity 5 
possessed by the Auvergne volcanoes, as evidenced by Caesar and Plmy, are 
those of Dr. Daubeny (Daubeny on Volcanoes, p. 14, quoted by Mr. By el I, 
Elements of Geology, ii. 305) ; but Dr. Daubeny mistakmgly ascribes 
the same silence to Sidonius Apollinaris ; whilst, singularly enough, the 
very witness upon whose omissions the geologist lays the most stress, is the 
