plains below a great river of liquid fire, nearly two miles in
breadth, and between seven and eight feet in depth, which advanced
at the rate of upwards of a hundred feet in an hour, carrying
before it devastation and ruin. Its course being through a highly
cultivated country, the damage it inflicted was immense. This
eruption continued for several months, with only short intervals of
rest.

[Illustration: Crater of Etna.]

It has more than once happened, that the lava-streams of Etna, in
their descent from the crater of eruption, have come to a
precipitous wall of rock, over which they have plunged in a cascade
similar to that formed by the lava of Vesuvius in 1855, but on a
less magnificent scale, as respects the height of the fall. One of
these occasions was during the eruption of 1771, and another during
that of 1819.

The principal cone of Mount Etna was ascended in 1834 by Messrs.
Elie de Beaumont and Leopold von Buch. The former describes what
they saw in the following terms:--"It was to us a moment of
surprise difficult to describe, when we found ourselves
unexpectedly on the margin--not, indeed, of the great crater--but
of an almost circular gulf, nearly three hundred feet in diameter,
which does not touch the great crater save at a small part of its
circumference. We peered eagerly into this nearly cylindrical
funnel; but vain was our search into the secret of its volcanic
action. From the almost horizontal tops of the nearly vertical
steeps, nothing can be descried but the upper cone. On trying to
reckon those one below another, vision becomes gradually lost in