Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/413

Rh denuded of ligaments; a proof how ancient in Southern Italy this barbarous mode of naked interment of the poor, (which is still in use at Naples) has been. The chief interest to science, however, lay in this; many of the bones and some skulls had been thrown from the mass along with the debris of the wall; upon the precipitous limestone slope where they rested, some small calcareous springs oozed out, and their deposited tufa was visible. It is not improbable that these human bones may become incased in tufa, and the latter may hereafter form at this spot a coarse conglomerate, with the fallen masonry and embedded bones.

The position of the tower is imperfectly seen in Photog. No. 191 (Coll. Roy. Soc.), and its appearance in Sketch Fig. 192 (Coll. Roy. Soc.): the tower was about 28 feet in internal diameter.

The time of the first great shock was marked here by the stoppage of the communal clock at 10h 15m Italian time reduced to Frankish, but no exact reliance can be placed upon this. Signor Jachetti admits that all their clocks and watches about the country are either set by sundown or by the watches of travellers coming from Naples or elsewhere.

Upon the bank of the Calore, out in the centre of the plain opposite Atena, Jachetti pointed out to me, a fissure in the deep clay soil, which had been opened nearly parallel to the stream. It was simply a land-slip of a few hundred feet in length, the fissure 6 or 7 inches wide, and the vertical descent about the same, and originated at the violent shake at the shock.

Immediately behind the town, in the small lateral valley,