For, if we examine Sir William Hamilton's account of the very eruption in question,* we shall find, that he had reason to conclude, that the pine-like cloud of ashes projected from Vesuvius, at one part of the time during this eruption, was twenty-five or thirty miles in height; and, if to this conclusion we add, not only that some ashes actually were carried to a greater distance than two hundred miles; but that, when any substance is at a vast height in the atmosphere, a very small variation of the direction of its course, causes a most prodigious variation in the extent of the range of ground where it shall fall; (just as the least variation in the angle, at the vertex of an isosceles triangle, causes a very great alteration in the extent of its base;) we may easily perceive, not only the possibility, but the probability, that the ashes in question, projected to so vast an height, were first carried even beyond Siena in Tuscany, northward; and then brought back, by a contrary current of wind, in the direction in which they fell.

Sir William Hamilton himself formed somewhat this sort of conclusion, on receiving the first intimation of this shower of stones from the Earl of Bristol.‡

I cannot therefore but allow my own conclusion to carry conviction with it to my own mind; and to send it forth into the world; as a ground, at least, for speculation, and reflection, to the minds of others.

That ashes, and sand, and pyritical and sulphureous dust, mixed with metallic particles from volcanoes; fit for the in

In the Philos. Trans. for 1795, p. 91, 92.

+ This is mentioned by Sir William Hamilton himself, p. 105. See Philos. Trans. for 1795, p. 104, 105.

:

stantaneous crystallization, and consolidation of such bodies as we have been describing, are often actually floating in the atmosphere, at incredible distances from volcanoes, and more frequently than the world are at all aware of, is manifest from several well attested facts.

On the 26th of December, 1631, Captain Badily, being in the Gulph of Volo, in the Archipelago, riding at anchor, about ten o'clock at night, it began to rain sand and ashes; and continued to do so till two o'clock the next morning. The ashes lay about two inches thick on the deck: so that they cast them overboard just as they had done snow the day before. There was no wind stirring, when the ashes fell: and yet this extraordinary shower was not confined merely to the place where Badily's ship was ;* but, as it appeared afterwards, was extended so widely to other parts, that ships coming from St. John d'Acre to that port, being at the distance of one hundred leagues from thence, were covered with the same sort of ashes. And no possible account could be given of them, except that they might come from Vesuvius.

On the 23d of October, 1755, a ship belonging to a merchant of Leith, bound for Charles Town, in Carolina, being betwixt Shetland and Iceland, and about twenty-five leagues distant from the former, and therefore about three hundred miles from the latter, a shower of dust fell in the night upon the decks.+

In October, 1762, at Detroit, in America, was a most surprising darkness, from day-break till four in the afternoon, during which time some rain falling, brought down, with the See Lowthorp's Abridgement of the Philos. Trans. Vol. II. p. 143. + Philos. Trans. Vol. XLIX. p. 510.

drops, sulphur and dirt; which rendered white paper black, and when burned fizzed like wet gunpowder:* and whence such matter could originally be brought, appeared to be past all conjecture, unless it came so far off as from the volcano in Guadaloupe.

Condamine says, the ashes of the volcano of Sangay, in South America, sometimes pass over the provinces of Maca, and Quito; and are even carried as far as Guayaquil.†

And Hooke says,‡ that on occasion of a great explosion from a volcano, in the island of Ternata, in the East Indies, there followed so great a darkness, that the inhabitants could not see each other the next day: and he justly leads us to infer what an immense quantity of ashes must, by this means, have been showered down somewhere on the sea; because at Mindanao, an hundred miles off, all the land was covered with ashes a foot thick.

And now, I must add; that such kind of falling of stones from the clouds, as has been described to have happened in Tuscany, seems to have happened also in very remote ages, of which we are not without sufficient testimony; and such as well deserves to be allowed and considered, on the present occasion; although the knowledge of the facts was, at first, in days of ignorance and gross darkness, soon perverted to the *very worst purposes.

In the Acts of the holy Apostles, we read, that the chief magistrate, at Ephesus, begun his harangue to the people, by saying, "Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there that knoweth "not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the

• Philos. Trans. Vol. LIII. p. 54. In his Experiments, p. 35.

+ Condamine's Journal, p. 57.

great goddess Diana, and of the IMAGE which fell down from Jupiter?" (or rather, as the original Greek has it)" of THAT "which fell down from Jupiter?" And the learned Greaves leads us to conclude this image of Diana to have been nothing but a conical, or pyramidal stone, that fell from the clouds. For he tells us,* on unquestionable authorities, that many others of the images of heathen deities were merely such.

Herodian expressly declares,+ that the Phoenicians had no statue of the sun, polished by hand, to express an image; but only had a certain great stone, circular below, and ending with a sharpness above, in the figure of a cone, of black colour. And they report it to have fallen from heaven, and to be the image of the sun.

So Tacitus says, that at Cyprus, the image of Venus was not of human shape; but a figure rising continually round, from a larger bottom to a small top, in conical fashion. And it is to be remarked, that Maximus Tyrius (who perhaps was a more accurate mathematician,) says, the stone was pyramidal.

And in Corinth, we are told by Pausanias,§ that the images both of Jupiter Melichius, and of Diana, were made (if made at all by hand) with little or no art. The former being represented by a pyramid, the latter by a column.

Clemens Alexandrinus was so well acquainted with these facts, that he even concludes || the worship of such stones to have been the first, and earliest idolatry, in the world.

It is hard to conceive how mankind should ever have been led to so accursed an abomination, as the worship of stocks, and stones, at all: but, as far as any thing so horrid is to be ac

counted for, there is no way so likely of rendering a possible account; as that of concluding, that some of these pyramidal stones, at least, like the image of Diana, actually did fall, in the earliest ages, from the clouds; in the same manner as these pyramidal stones fell, in 1794, in Tuscany.

Plutarch, it is well known, mentions* a stone which formerly fell from the clouds, in Thrace, and which Anaxagoras fancied to have fallen from the sun.

And it is very remarkable, that the old writer, from whom Plutarch had his account, described the cloud, from which this stone was said to fall, in a manner (if we only make some allowance for a little exaggeration in barbarous ages,) very similar to Soldani's account of the cloud in Tuscany.-It hovered about for a long time; seemed to throw out splinters, which flew about, like wandering stars, before they fell; and at last it cast down to the earth a stone of extraordinary size.

Pliny, who tells us that not only the remembrance of this event, but that the stone itself was preserved to his days, says, it was of a dark burnt colour. And though he does indeed speak of it as being of an extravagant weight and size, in which circumstance perhaps he was misled: yet he mentions another of a moderate size, which fell in Abydos, and was become an object of idolatrous worship in that place; as was still another, of the same sort, at Potidaa.

Livy, who like Herodotus, has been oftentimes censured as too credulous, and as a relater of falsehoods, for preserving traditions of an extraordinary kind; which, after all, in ages of more enlarged information, have proved to have been founded * In Vita Lysandri. + Diogenes in Anaxag.

Historia Nat. lib. 2. cap. 59.