Arrived at last at the foot of the cone of ashes, the traveller must leave his mule or ass, and trust to his feet in ascending that fatiguing, though in the present state of the mountain, short ascent. An active man may accomplish it in thirty minutes, though not without great labour, from the sinking and sliding of the volcanic ashes. His trouble, however, will soon be overpaid by the spectacle which awaits him on reaching the summit. And first he will naturally look inwards towards the crater at which lie has at length arrived. Its vas: magnitude, the ruggedness of its extreme edge, the appalling abruptness of the precipice from the summit of which he first obtains his view, the loud and repeated echoes which the shrill voices of the guides excite through the cavern, and the curling smoke rising from the abyss, often concealing by its dense volumes the remote recesses, and not un accompanied perhaps, with internal boiling of the igneous fluid, the chance ejection of stones, or the occasional fall of rocks, the noise of whose descent is responded to by a hundred cliffs, all makes the scene one, the first impression of which is so noble, so striking, as perhaps is not to be renewed. But let him examine the structure more closely. In the late state of the mountain (we speak of the years 1826-7), he might without the shadow of danger descend two-thirds of the depth of the crater, by walking round a semi-circumference of it till he arrives at its south-eastern point. There the in ternal side, instead of presenting the abrupt preci pice of its opposite extremity, shelves gradually inwards, aided by the much reduced elevation of its edge, which differs more than 500 feet from the N.W. point. Here we may descend till we reach a precipice 500 feet in height, which separates us from the bottom; and from this lone and unfre quented spot we may at leisure survey nature in some of her most remarkable forms. 'We tread amidst thick beds of sulphur, the crevices of which often emit steamy spiracles rapidly condensed by the chillness of the air, which is frequently great even amidst these subterranean fires. The shades of colour which the sulphur beds present, are most varied and beautiful, from the palest straw colour, where the pure yellow is diluted with the white de posits of decomposed lava, and occasionally of sul phate of alumina, up to the rich orange, which the intermixture of arsenic, forming red and yellow or piment, occasionally presents. But grander scenes and sterner formations withdraw the attention of the observer from the mineral world immediately beneath his feet. He has but to raise his eyes to see the distended jaws of this great abyss stand in all their ruggedness before him. Huge misshapen crags rise on either hand, only their salient points conceal the remoter trendings of that volcanic plain which stands poised over unfathomed caverns, the laboratories of Cyclopian energy. The plateau of the crater is indeed but a crust, of which upon any excess of volcanic explosive force below, we have abundant proof by the formation of miniature cra ters, through which may be distinctly heard on such occasions, the boiling noise of internal agita tion, and the rattling of stones, elevated from the pit, with the constantly succeeding columns of smoke which are the consequence. Nature seems to have completely barred the volcanic plateau from the access of mortal foot, in the present state of the mountain, yet the hardihood of strangers some times induces them to descend by means of ropes these tremendous natural ramparts, with the great danger of detaching masses of rock in the course of their descent. In this, as in all other enterprises of which empty vanity in personal achievement is the only excitement, we regret to add, our country men predominate in numbers: whether the task be to scale the frozen summit of Mont Blanc, or grap ple with the embryo thunderbolt at the very forge of Vulcan; or the easier feat of scratching initials on the Ball of St. Peter's,—in every act of vain-glo rious temerity the English name is pre-eminent.
From the edge of the crater the distant view is almost equally worthy the traveller's attention in surprising contrast with the spectacle of its in terior:—there the rudest elements employed in the laboratory of nature, the unformed heap, the chaotic confusion, the groaning or thunderous sounds as of Nature's throes:—here robed in her fairest forms and hues, displaying all the beauties of recondite arrangement, and refined collocation of parts; the riches of her different kingdoms com bined to form as it were a model of inartificial per fection. At sunset especially the scene may be most fully appreciated; the further beams or the great luminary as he sinks behind the remote shore of Gaeta, gild the distant waves of the Tyrrhene Sea, and invest the more abrupt points of the Ital ian shore with a halo of ini..ty splendour. Nearer
the eye, they throw long shadows from higher emi nences in the Bay of Naples, the island of Ischia with its once volcanic summit, formerly much more to be dreaded than the now active Vesuvius; the hill of the Camaldoli; the humbler ridge of Pau silipo. The ancient crawl's of Averno and Agna no, now occupied by lakes, demonstrate their true form by their deepening shadows, the domes and spires of Naples, and the old grey turrets of the Castel St. Elmo receive, and part with the declin ing solar ray,—and whilst on the left, the tower ing hills of the promontory of Minerva. which form the eastern wing of the Bay, blaze in the broad ex panse of sunshine, the distant Apennines behind the spectator as he faces the setting luminary, sink in the greyness of the twilight, and are soon lost in the dewy mists of the horizon.
The phenomena of eruptions are in all volcanos perhaps, very similar in a general view. Preced ing earthquakes, subterranean noises, drying of wells, occasionally retirement of the sea, intimate the near approach of the catastrophe, and these are succeeded by heaving and splitting of the moun tain, stillness and cloudiness in the air, accompan ied with a highly electric condition, which imparts to the eruption some of its most extraordinary ac cessory phenomena. The explosive force from be low having opened a rent in the crater, a vast dis charge of gaseous fluids follow, and though not un often accompanied by boiling water in streams, Vesuvius more frequently discharges showers of dry impalpable volcanic dust, so fine as to be sus tained a considerable time in the higher regions of the atmosphere, where having attained the height at which the continued force of gravity and the di minished density of the air overcome the projectile momentum, the thin tall stream accumulates and spreads, having something of an umbrella form, or more accurately, that of the Italian pine (Pinus Pi nea) to which it was first compared by Pliny, and for which this mountain has ever been remarkable.' The dusty particles then descend over a vast extent of country, in a thick shower. It rarely happens that the crater is in a state to afford a ready over flow of lava, and therefore from the simple princi ples of hydrostatic pressure, that fluid bursts for it self a point of emission near the base of the moun tain, and frequently elevates a parasitic cone. Thus the lava of 1794 (that dreadful eruption which last overwhelmed Torre del Greco) issued from a crack at the base of the cone, on the Pedamentina, about half a mile in length according to Breislak, and 100 yards wide. In the eruption of 1760, no less than fifteen mouths opened on the southern side of the mountain, raising as many cones, but the number of which was soon reduced to seven, and finally to four, the height of one of which is 200 feet. Again in the great eruption of 1822, several small cones were raised in the Atrio del Cavallo, between Ve suvius and the Hermitage.
Referring for more detailed accounts of particu lar eruptions, or of their general features, to the works of Hamilton, Breislak, Della Torre, Mecatti, and `trope, we may mention the connexion which has been supposed to exist between Vesuvius and other volcanic emissaries. This question is a very important one, yet is still involved in considerable doubt. Breislak, who had the best means of judg ing, strenuously denied it,i but we must suspect his judgment to have been biassed by preconceived opinions, from the general conception of the re verse which prevails respecting the connexion at least of Vesuvius and Solfatara, a sentiment which we ourselves have had the means of confirming, and which Sir Humphry Davy, a philosopher whose temperate judgment must ever command respect even for his hypotheses, expressly countenances. He observed the Solfatara on the 21st February 1820, two clays before the eruption of Vesuvius was at its height ; " the columns of steam," says he, "which usually rise in large quantities when Ve suvius is were now scarcely visible,•and a piece of paper thrown into the aperture did not rise again, so that there was every reason to suppose the existence of a descending current of air."4 It might however be supposed, that the connexion of two volcanoes so nearly approached as Vesuvius and Etna, would be more defined than it appears to be. Among 50 eruptions of the former, and 48 of the latter, occurring since the Christian era, the following are the nearest coincidences.§ We must next very briefly notice the more im portant mineral productions of Vesuvius, confining ourselves to those of great extent and volcanic ori gin. These may be divided into lava, breccia, tufa, and volcanic dust.