Page:Omniana 2.djvu/223

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OMNIANA.
213

morning that the ship's rigging had gathered a red sand, which it posed the sailors to account for, not being within view of any land. None of them had ever seen the like before, and it could only be conjectured that the wind must have brought it off from the Pike of Teneriffe[1]."

Spallanzani[2], examining some stones which fell in an ignited shower from Vesuvius, found that they were particles of lava, which had become solid in the air, and taken a globose form.

According to some of the Mahommedan doctors, the storm which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah was a hailstorm of red-hot stones, heated in the furnaces of Hell.

224. West's Immortality of Nelson.

This frontispiece to the huge life of

  1. Two Missionary Voyages to New Jersey, and to the Coast of Guiney, by Thomas Thompson, Vicar of Reculver in Kent, 1758.
  2. Travels in the Two Sicilies. Ch. 1.