ciation assisted in carrying out this work | pear are like the tropical regions of the by assigning to it the dome of the Kew earth where tornadoes and cyclones occur. Observatory, and by securing its comple- The faculæ indicate that the tropical retion in 1857 in their workshop at the same gions of the sun are highly agitated, and place. The expense of its construction, that immense waves of luminous matter one hundred and eighty pounds, was de- are thrown up, between which the dark frayed by Mr. Oliveira. This instrument cavities of the spots appear, whose sloping was conveyed to Spain at the time of the sides are seen in the penumbra, as explaineclipse in 1860, and did good solar service ed by Wilson in the last century. Öther under the care of Mr. De La Rue, who solar phenomena might be pointed out as has generously undertaken the charge of analogies between solar spots and earthly the instrument for the present. The ob- storms; and the autographs here referred ject is to continue the use of the photo- to confirm the observations of Mr. Nasheliograph for a series of years, and by myth. accumulating observations to afford fair grounds for reasoning. It plain language, the sun must be made to take a large number of likenesses of himself for every day in every year, and then we may form a warrantable idea of his real condition. We shall then know his frowns and his smiles, his spots and his luminous surface, and learn how he really appears when he looks his best or his worst. The subject of Refraction was treated by Professor Challis; but it is too scientific for brief popular representation. Its importance is practically great, as, for instance, in the case of determining the real diameter of the moon; for if refraction in any atmosphere which the moon may have, be such as it is in that surrounding our earth, the apparent diameter of the moon as ascertained by measurement would be Professor Selwyn exhibited several " au- greater than that inferred from the obsertographs of the sun" taken by a photo-vation of an occultation of a star, because grapher at Ely. The phenomena shown in these autographs seemed to confirm the views of Sir J. Herschel that the two parallel regions of the sun where the spots ap by reason of the refraction of the atmosphere the star would disappear and reappear when the line of vision was within the moon's apparent boundary. The ground since the first earthquake in 63 had often been shaken by slight shocks, when at length, in August, 79, they became more numerous and violent, and on the night preceding the eruption, so tremendous as to threaten every thing with destruction. A morning of comparative repose succeeded, and the terrified inhabitants of those devoted towns no doubt breathed more freely, and hoped the worst was over; when, about one o'clock in the afternoon, the Elder Pliny, who was stationed in command of the Roman fleet at Misenum in full view of Vesuvius, beheld a huge black cloud rising from the mountain, which, "rising slowly always higher," at last spread out aloft like the head of one of those picturesque flat-topped pines which form such an ornament of the Italian landscape. The meaning of such a phenomenon was to Pliny and to every one a mystery. We know now too well what it imports, and they were not long left in doubt. From that cloud descended stones, ashes, and pumice; and the cloud itself lowered down upon the surrounding country, involving land and sea in profound darkness, pierced by flashes of fire more vivid than lightning. These, with the volumes of ashes that began to encumber the soil, and which covered the sea with floating pumice-stone, the constant heaving of the ground, and the sudden recoil of the sea, form a picture which is wonderfully well described by the Younger Pliny. His uncle, animated by an eager desire to know what was going on, and to afford aid to the inhabitants of the towns, made sail for the nearest point of the coast and landed; but was instantly enveloped in the dense sulphureous vapor that swept down from the mountain, and perished miserably. It does not seem that any lava flowed on that occasion. Pompeii was buried under the ashes; Herculaneum by a torrent of mud, probably the contents of the erater, ejected at the first explosion. This was most fortunate. We owe to it the preservation of some of the most wonderful remains of antiquity. For it is not yet much more than a century ago that, in digging a well at Portici near Naples, the Theater of Herculaneum was discovered, some sixty feet under ground, -then houses, baths, statues, and, most interesting of all, a library full of books, and those books still legible, and among them the writings of some ancient authors which had never before been met with, but which have now been read, copied, and published, while hundreds and hundreds, I am sorry to say, still remain unopened. Pompeii was not buried so deep; the walls of some of the buildings appeared among the modern vineyards, and led to excavations, which were easy, the ashes being light and loose. And there you now may walk through the streets, enter the houses, and find the skeletons of their inmates, some in the very act of trying to escape. Nothing can be more strange and striking. Since that time Vesuvius has been frequently but very irregularly in eruption. The next after Pompeii was in the year 202, under Severus; and in 472 occurred an eruption so tremendous that all Europe was covered by the ashes, and even Constantinople thrown into alarm. This may seem to savor of the marvelous, but before I have done, I hope to show that it is not beyond what we know of the power of existing volcanos. I shall not, of course, occupy attention with a history of Vesuvius, but pass at once to the eruption of 1779-one of the most interesting on record, from the excellent account given of it by Sir William Hamilton, who was then resident at Naples as our Minister, and watched it throughout with the eye of an artist as well as the scrutiny of a philosopher. In 1767, there had been a considerable eruption, during which Pliny's account of the great pine-like, flat-topped, spreading mass of smoke had been superbly seen, extending over the Island of Capri, which is twenty-eight miles from Vesuvius. The showers of ashes, the lava currents, the lightnings, thunderings, and earthquakes were very dreadful; but they were at once brought to a close when the mob insisted that the head of St. Januarius should be brought out and shown to the mountain, and when this was done, all the uproar ceased on the instant, and Vesuvius became as quiet as a lamb! He did not continue so, however, and it would have been well for Naples if the good Saint's head could have been permanently fixed in some conspicuous place in sight of the hill-for from that time till the year 1779 it never was quiet. In the spring of that year it began to pour out lava; and on one occasion, when Sir William Hamilton approached too near, the running stream was on the point of surrounding him, and the sulphureous vapor cut off his retreat, so that his only mode of escape was to walk across the lava,* which, to his astonishment, and, no doubt, to his great joy, he found accompanied with no difficulty, and with no more inconvenience than what proceeded from the radiation of heat, on his legs and feet, from the scoria and cinders with which the external crust of the lava was loaded, and which in great measure intercepted and confined the glowing heat of the ignited mass below. bales of the whitest cotton, in a mass exceeding four times the hight and size of the mountain itself, the lava began to overflow the rim of the crater, and stream in torrents down the steep slope of the cone. This was continued till the eighth, when the great mass of the lava would seem to have been evacuated, and no longer repressing by its weight the frce discharge of the imprisoned gases, allowed what remained to be ejected in fountains of fire, carried up to an immense hight in the air. The description of one of these I must give in the picturesque In such cases, and when cooled down and vivid words of Sir William Hamilton to a certain point, the motion of the lava- himself. "About nine o'clock," he says, stream is slow and creeping; rather roll-on Sunday the eighth of August, "there ing over itself than flowing like a river, the top becoming the bottom, owing to the toughness of the half-congealed crust. When it issues, however, from any accessible vent, it is described as perfectly liquid, of an intense white heat, and spouting or welling forth with extreme rapidity. So Sir Humphry Davy described it in an eruption at which he was present; and so Sir William Hamilton, in the eruption we are now concerned with, saw it, "bubbling up violently" from one of its foun-it tains on the slope of the volcano, "with a hissing and crackling noise, like that of an artificial firework, and forming, by the continual splashing up of the vitrified matter, a sort of dome or arch over the crevice from which it issued," which was all, internally, "red-hot like a heated oven." was a loud report, which shook the houses at Portici and its neighborhood to such a degree, as to alarm the inhabitants and drive them out into the streets. Many windows were broken, and as I have since seen, walls cracked by the concussion of the air from that explosion. . . . In one instant a fountain of liquid transparent fire began to rise, and gradually increasing, arrived at so amazing a hight, as to strike every one who beheld sea. with the most awful astonishment. I shall scarcely be credited when I assure you that, to the best of my judgment, the hight of this stupendous column of fire could not be less than three times that of Vesuvius itself, which, you know, rises perpendicularly near thirtyseven hundred feet above the level of the (The hight by my own meaHowever, as time went on, this quiet surement in 1824 is thirty-nine hundred mode of getting rid of its contents would and twenty feet.) "Puffs of smoke, as no longer suffice, and the usual symptoms black as can possibly be imagined, sucof more violent action-rumbling noises ceeded one another hastily, and accompaand explosions within the mountain, puffs nied the red-hot, transparent, and liquid of smoke from its crater, and jets of red-lava, interrupting its splendid brightness hot stones and ashes-continued till the end of July, when they increased to such a degree as to exhibit at night the most beautiful firework imaginable. The eruption came to its climax from the fifth to the tenth of August, on the former of which days, after the ejection of an enormous volume of white clouds, piled like We spent the night of August 2d, 1849, on Vesuvius, which was pouring out a river of melted lava, forming a lake a mile and a half long and a mile wide, upon which we walked a considerable distance, jumping from one old block of lava to another. We saw quite near us streams of lava running along like red hot molasses, EDITOR OF ECLECTIC. here and there by patches of the darkest and of the extraordinary hight above | heart of the town was all in a blaze, and mentioned, casting a heat to the distance had there been much wind, the flames. of at least six miles around it. The brush- must have spread universally, and all the wood of the mountain of Somma was soon inhabitants would have infallibly been in a flame, which, being of a different tint burnt in their houses, for it was impossifrom the deep red of the matter thrown ble for them to stir out. Some who atout from the volcano, and from the silvery tempted it with pillows, tables, chairs, blue of the electrical fire, still added to the tops of wine-casks, etc., on their heads, contrast of this most extraordinary scene. were either knocked down or driven back After the column of fire had continued in to their close quarters, under arches and full force for near half an hour, the erup- in the cellars of the houses. Many were tion ceased at once, and Vesuvius remain- wounded, but only two persons have died ed sullen and silent." of the wounds they received from this dreadful volcanic shower. To add to the horror of the scene, incessant volcanic lightning was writhing about the black cloud that surrounded them, and the sulphureous smell and heat would scarcely allow them to draw their breath." The lightnings here described arose evidently in part from the chemical activity of gaseous decompositions going forward, in part to the friction of steam, and in part from the still more intense friction of the dust, stones, and ashes encountering one another in the air, in analogy to the electric manifestations which accompany the dust-storms in India. To give an idea of the state of the inhabitants of the country when an explosion is going on, I will make one other extract: "The mountain of Somma, at the foot of which Ottaiano is situated, hides Vesuvius from its sight, so that till the eruption became considerable it was not visible to them. On Sunday night, when the noise increased, and the fire began to appear above the mountain of Somma, many of the inhabitants of the town flew to the churches, and others were preparing to quit the town, when a sudden violent report was heard, soon after which they found themselves involved in a thick cloud of smoke and minute ashes: a horrid clashing noise was heard in the air, and presently fell a deluge of stones and large scoriæ, some of which scoria were of the diameter of seven or eight feet, and must have weighed more than one hundred pounds before they were broken by their falls, as some of the fragments of them which I picked up in the street, still weighed upward of sixty pounds. When these large vitrified masses either struck against each other in the air or fell on the ground they broke in many pieces, and covered a large space around them with vivid sparks of fire, which communicated their heat to every thing that was combustible. In an instant the town and country about it were on fire in many parts; for in the vineyards there were several straw huts, which had been erected for the watchmen of the grapes, all of which were burnt. A great magazine of wood in the The next volcano I shall introduce is Etna, the grandest of all our European volcanos. I ascended it in 1824, and found its hight by a very careful barometric measurement to be ten thousand seven hundred and seventy-two feet above the sea, which, by the way, agrees within some eight or ten feet with Admiral Smyth's measurement. The scenery of Etna is on the grandest scale. Ascending from Catania, you skirt the stream of lava which destroyed a large part of that city in 1669, and which ran into the sea, forming a jetty or break water that now gives Catania what it never had before, the advantage of a harbor. There it lies as hard, rugged, barren, and fresh looking as if it had flowed but yesterday. In many places it is full of huge caverns, great air-bubbles, into which one may ride on horseback, (at least large enough,) and which communicate, in a succession of horrible vaults, where one might wander and lose one's self without hopes of escape. Higher up, near Nicolo si, is the spot from which that lava flowed. It is marked by two volcanic cones, each of them a considerable mountain, called the Monti Rossi, rising three hundred feet above the slope of the hill, and which were thrown up on that occasion. deed, one of the most remarkable features of Etna is that of its flanks bristling over with innumerable smaller volcanos. For the hight is so great that the lava now scarcely ever rises to the top of the crater, for before that its immense weight breaks through at the sides. In one of the eruptions that happened in the early part of In the century, I forget the date, but I think | was fairly filled, the lava again overflowed it was in 1819, and which was described and divided into two streams, one of to me on the spot by an eye-witness-the which covered some ancient lava-fields; Old Man of the Mountain, Mario Gemel- the other reëntered the bed of the Skapta laro-the side of Etna was rent by a lower down, and presented the astounding great fissure or crack, beginning near the sight of a cataract of liquid fire pouring top, and throwing out jets of lava from over what was formerly the waterfall of openings fourteen or fifteen in number all Stapafoss. This was the greatest eruption the way down, so as to form a row of fiery on record in Europe. It lasted in its viofountains, rising from different levels, and lence till the end of August, and closed all ascending nearly to the same hight, with a violent earthquake; but for nearly and thereby proving them all to have the whole year a canopy of cinder-laden originated in the great internal cistern as cloud hung over the island; the Faroe it were, the crater being filled up to the Islands; nay, even Shetland and the top level. Orkneys, were deluged with the ashes, and volcanic dust and a preternatural smoke which obscured the sun, covered all Europe as far as the Alps, over which it could not rise. I have little doubt that the great Fire-ball of August 18th, 1783, which traversed all England and the Continent, from the North Sea to Rome, by far the greatest ever known, (for it was more than half a mile in diameter,) was somehow connected with the electric excitement of the upper atmosphere, produced by this enormous discharge of smoke and ashes. The destruction of life in Iceland was frightful; nine thousand men, eleven thousand cattle, twenty-eight thousand horses, and one hundred and ninety thousand sheep perished; mostly by suffocation. The lava ejected has been computed to have amounted in volume to more than twenty cubic miles. We shall now proceed to still more remote regions, and describe, in as few words as may be, two immense eruptions-one From the summit of Ætna extends a view of extraordinary magnificence. The whole of Sicily lies at your feet, and far beyond it are seen a string of lesser vol. canoes, the Lipari Islands, between Sicily and the Italian coast, one of which, Stromboli, is always in eruption, unceasingly throwing up ashes, smoke, and liquid fire. But I must not linger on the summit of Etna. We will now take a flight thence, all across Europe, to Iceland-a wonderful land of frost and fire. It is full of volcanoes, one of which, HECLA, has been twenty-two times in eruption within the last eight hundred years. Besides Hecla, there are five others, from which in the same period twenty eruptions have burst forth, making about one every twenty years. The most formidable of these was that which happened in 1783, a year also memorable as that of the terrible earthquake in Calabria. In May of that year, a bluish fog was observed over the mountain called Skaptar Jokul, and the neigh-in borhood was shaken by earthquakes. Af ter a while a great pillar of smoke was observed to ascend from it, which darkenened the whole surrounding district, and which descended in a whirlwind of ashes. On the tenth of May, innumerable fountains of fire were seen shooting up through the ice and snow which covered the mountain; and the principal river, called the Skapta, after rolling down a flood of foul and poisonous water, disappeared. Two days after a torrent of lava poured down into the bed which the river had deserted. The river had run in a deep ravine, six hundred feet deep and two hundred broad. This the lava entirely filled, and not only so, but it overflowed over the surrounding country, and ran into a great lake, from which it instantly expelled the water in an explosion of steam. When the lake Mexico in the year 1759, the other in the island of Sumbawa in the Eastern Archipelago, in 1815. I ought to mention, by way of preliminary, that almost the whole line of coast of South and Central America, from Mexico southward as far as Valparaiso-that is to say, nearly the whole chain of the Andes-is one mass of volcanos. In Mexico and Central America, there are two and twenty, and in Quito, Peru, and Chili, six and twenty more in activity; and nearly as many more extinct ones, any one of which may at any moment break out afresh. This does not prevent the country from being inhabited, fertile, and well cultivated. Well, in a district in Mexico celebrated for the growth of the finest cotton, between two streams called Cuitimba and San Pedro, which furnished water for irrigation, lay the farm and |