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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: red with heat. When they reached the extremity of this movable causeway the blocks fell into the sea, filled it little by little, and the fluid mass advanced by so much. At this contact large bodies of water, reduced to a state of vapour, rose up with frightful hissings, and fell in a salt rain over the neighbouring country. In some days the lava had carried forward the line of the beach some 330 yards. During the eruptions of 1754, 1766, 1771, 1780, 1792, 1809, and 1812, enormous rents have opened passages for the lava and scoriae, by orifices situated in the line of fissure. Some of the cones, formed in a few days round these orifices, measured 1,000 feet in height. The lava beds are, on the average, 26 to 32 feet thick, and sometimes much more. We see then, clearly, that the mass of Etna must have been wonderfully increased by this enormous quantity of material ejected during historic time; and in comparing this period with the primitive one, the immense length of which is shown by geology, we are led to believe that the greater part of the mountain, like Iceland, has been formed by a series of eruptions and by the interior accession of injected lava. ERUPTION OF 1865. Frequent shocks of earthquakes, felt on the sides of Etna in the month of October 1864, were the first symptoms of this recent eruption. Towards the end of January a whirlwind of smoke rose from the Souvenirs d'un naturaliste. By A. de Quatrefages. 9.?ETNA. ERUPTION OF 1766. crater, and, at the same time, dull roarings, accompanied by slight shocks, were heard on the eastern slope of the Apennines. Eound Etna the atmosphere, although calm, was suffocating; the column of smoke continued to rise higher and to become more dense; and other well-known signs portended a coming awakening of t...