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apprehensions about the future, arises on the recollection that, beneath a soil so fruitful and so smiling, lie edifices, gardens, and whole towns swallowed up. Portici rests upon Herculaneum; its environs upon Resina: and at a little distance is Pompeii, in the streets of which, after more than seventeen centuries of non-existence, the astonished traveller now walks. After a long interval of repose, in the first year of the reign of                 Titus, (the seventy-ninth of the christian                  era,) the volcano suddenly broke out, ejecting thick clouds of ashes and pumice-stones, be- neath which Herculaneum, Stabia, and Pom- peii, were completely buried. This eruption was fatal to the elder Pliny, the historian, who fell a victim to his humanity and love of science. Even at this day, in speaking of                 Vesuvius, the remembrance of his untimely death excites a melancholy regret. All the coast to the east of the gulf of Naples was, on the above occasion, ravaged and destroyed, presenting nothing but a long succession of                 ejected matters from Herculaneum to Stabia, The destruction did not, however extend to                 the western part, but stopped at Naples, which suffered comparatively little. Thirty-eight eruptions of Vesuvius are re- corded in history up to the year 1806. That of 1779 has been described by Sir William Hamilton as among the most remarkable,