terror, has been exceedingly exaggerated in the public papers; and two Neapolitan chemists, Vicenzo Pepe and Giuseppe di Nobili, notwithstanding the statements of Monticelli and Covelli to the contrary, even describe the ashes as containing silver and gold. According to the results of my researches and inquiries, the thickness of the bed of ashes formed by the twelve days' shower was but little above three feet, towards Bosche Tre Case, on the slope of the cone where rapilli were mingled with them; and in the plain, from 15-1/2 to 19 inches at the utmost. Such measurements ought not to be taken in places where the ashes have been heaped up by the action of wind, like drifted snow or sand, or have accumulated from being carried thither by water. The times are passed for seeking only the marvellous in volcanic phenomena, in the manner of the ancients among whom Ctesias made the ashes of Etna to be conveyed as far as the Indian peninsula. There are in Mexico veins of gold and silver in trachytic porphyry; but in the ashes of Vesuvius which I brought back with me, and which an excellent chemist, Heinrich Rose, has examined at my request, no traces of either gold or silver have been discovered.
Although the above mentioned results, which are quite in accordance with the exact observations of Monticelli, differ much from the accounts which have been current during the short interval which has elapsed, it is nevertheless true that the eruption of ashes from Vesuvius from the 24th to the 28th of last October (1822) is the most memorable of any of which we possess an authentic account, since that which occasioned the death of the elder Pliny. The quantity of
