92 Sir William Hamilton’s Account of 
the distance from the crater of Vesuvius to the most elevated 
part of the cloud, appeared to me nearly the same as that of 
the island of Caprea from Naples, and which is about 25 miles ; 
but I am well aware of the inaccuracy of such a sort of mea- 
surement. At the time of its greatest elevation, I engaged 
Signor Gatta, successor to the late ingenious Mr. Fabris, 
to make an exact drawing of it, which he did with great suc- 
cess ; and a copy of that drawing on a small scale is inclosed 
(Tab. VII.), and will, I hope, give you a very good idea of 
what I have been describing. 
I must own, that at that moment I did apprehend Naples 
to be in some danger of being buried under the ashes of 
the volcano, just as the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii 
were in the year 79. The ashes that fell then at Pompeii 
were of the same fine quality as those from this eruption ; 
having often observed, when present at the excavations of 
that ancient city, that the ashes, which I suppose to have 
been mixed with water at the same time, had taken the ex- 
act impression or mould of whatever they had inclosed ; so 
that the compartments of the wood work of the windows 
and doors of the houses remained impressed on this volcanic 
tufo, although the wood itself had long decayed, and not an 
atom of it was to be seen, except when the wood had been 
burnt, and then you found the charcoal. Having once been 
present at the discovery of a skeleton in the great street of 
Pompeii, of a person who had been shut up by the ashes during 
the eruption of 79, I engaged the men that were digging to 
take off the piece of hardened tufo, that covered the head, with 
great care, and, as in a mould just taken off in plaster of Paris, 
we found the impression of the eyes, that were shut, of the 
