ioo Sir William Hamilton's Account oj 
found it to be 31 ounces ; when having washed oft' the volca- 
nic matter, it scarcely weighed 3 ounces. 
I saw several houses on the road, in my w r ay to the town of 
Somma, with their roofs beaten in by the weight of the ashes. 
In the town of Somma, I found four churches and about se- 
venty houses without roofs, and full of ashes. The great da- 
mage on this side of the mountain, by the fall of the ashes and 
the torrents, happened on the 18th, 19th, and 20th of June, 
and on the 12th of July. I heard but of three lives that had 
been lost at Somma by the fall of a house. The 19th, the 
ashes fell so thick at Somma (as they told me there), that un- 
less a person kept in motion, he was soon fixed to the ground 
by them. This fafi of ashes was accompanied also with loud 
, reports, and frequent flashes of the volcanic lightning, so that, 
surrounded by so many horrors, it was impossible for the 
inhabitants to remain in the town, and they all fled ; the 
darkness was such, although it was mid-day, that even with 
the help of torches it was scarcely possible to keep in the high 
road ; in short, what they described to me was exactly what 
Pliny the younger and his mother had experienced at Mi- 
senum during the eruption of Vesuvius in the reign of Titus. 
according to his second letter to Tacitus on that subject. I 
found that the majority of people here were convinced that the 
torrents of mud and water, that had done them so much mis- 
chief, came out of the crater of Vesuvius, and that it was sea- 
water ; but there cannot be any doubt of those floods having 
been occasioned by the sudden dissolution of watery clouds 
mixed with ashes, the air perhaps having been too much rare- 
fied to support them ; and when such clouds broke, and fell 
heavily on Vesuvius, the water not being able to penetrate 
