regions below, but, chameleonlike in their adaptation to their environment, they were dull reddish brown. Lunching at the last house, an empty wooden structure, we soon passed beyond the groves of low, slender chestnut trees, above all vegetation, into the desert zone, and, leaving the mules, ascended the crater cone of Monte Gemellaro. The mountain or hill is an ash heap or cinder cone, the loose material likened by M. Émile Chaix to coke or black powdery scoriæ, with lava underneath, and it rises upward of four hundred and fifty feet above the sides of Mount Etna, with a diameter of about six hundred feet. The crater is estimated to be one hundred and twenty-five feet deep, with two fissures at the bottom three or four yards wide. It was named after the distinguished geologist and student of volcanism, the late Prof. Gemellaro, of Catania. On the way up we passed small fissures, still steaming, and their edges incrusted with deposits of sulphur and arsenic. Such fissures are called solfataras. Small heated masses of rock and clay, still warm, lay scattered about. The structure of the inner walls of the crater is simple, reminding us of the upper edge of the crater of Popocatepetl. Under the bed of ashes the rim of the cone is made up of irregular layers of lava which slope away from the center down the sides. In fact, a crater of this sort is formed by the upthrust of masses of lava; and the repeated showers of stones, bombs, ashes, and lapilli, or coarse gravelly ashes, falling down vertically over the vent, give the regular conical shape to the crater, while the sloping sides of the funnel of the crater are formed by loose ashes rolling down the incline of the irregular vent or fissure at the bottom, which is kept clear by the passage of steam and showers of ashes during the progress of an eruption. The origin of the lava stream which threatened Nicolosi and the other towns below was mostly covered up by the thick layer of ashes. It should be understood that by the term "ashes" is meant the fragments of lava and clay, often with obsidian or volcanic glass, shattered during the more violent throes of the crater; the earthquakes and tremblings being due to the expansion of the steam pent up in the subterranean cavities and reservoirs of lava deep down in the bowels of the earth. From the accounts published in the scientific journals we gather the facts for the following history of this eruption. After a series of outbreaks, both from the crater of Etna and at other points below, on the 19th of May the lava began to stream down toward Nicolosi, accompanied by severe earthquakes. The stream divided, and the eruption assumed terrific proportions. The lava advanced over three kilometres in eight hours, steadily pushing on toward the village. On the 20th ten other craters opened. A dispatch stated: "Three of the craters are raging fearfully, emitting huge stones to a considerable height, and the roar and tumult are terrible"; meanwhile the central crater on the summit of Etna continued to vomit great columns of steam and ashes. "On Sunday the eruption had greatly diminished, but on Monday morning it broke forth with great violence, and a fresh crater sent out a stream of lava one hundred and fifty metres wide and twenty-three deep, which flowed down at the rate of one hundred and sixty to one hundred and ninety feet an hour toward Nicolosi. On Monday evening the news was very disquieting. The violence of the eruption was then greatly increasing, and Nicolosi seemed doomed to destruction. The noise at a considerable distance is described as resembling a continuous cannonade." On the 19th Prof. Amico recorded ninety-two earthquakes; on the following day, only twenty; but afterward the number rose from twenty-five to thirty, twenty-seven, twentyfive, and finally to fifty-two on the 25th. The eruption reached its height on the 31st of May, and the people were so alarmed that the town was evacuated. The great lava stream which threatened Nicolosi divided into two, one advancing toward Altarelli and the other descending on the east side of Monte Rosso, and on the 3d of June stopped within three hundred and seventy metres of the town, parting just behind a structure like that seen in the accompanying picture. The inhabitants affirm that this was in direct answer to the prayers of the clergy, who with their parishioners in solemn procession marched toward the advancing lava when the danger seemed most imminent. According to Prof. Silvestri, the lava stream of 1886, like that of 1883, flowed from the rent or fissure which was opened in 1875 in the flank of the volcano, and extended in a northeast and southwest direction. In the September following it was safe to visit the scene, and the Count L. dal Verme estimated that during the eruption Gemellaro ejected about sixty-six million cubic metres of eruptive matter, covering a space of five square kilometres and a half on the flank of the mountain, and approaching within less than half a mile of Nicolosi, situated near the upper limit of the vine. The vineyards were destroyed to the extent of some twenty thousand lire. In 1890 M. Émile Chaix, of Geneva, ascended Mount Etna, camping out several days on or near its summit. From his bright and interesting account, entitled Une Course à l'Etna, originally contributed to the Journal de Genève for September, 1890, we quote the following description of the crater of Gemellaro as it appeared the summer succeeding that in which we visited it: "It still gives out a little sulphurous vapor, and is carpeted with the red, yellow, and white products of the solfatara. But the richest volcanic colors are seen in a solfatara opening in an eminence on the outer and southern side of the volcano. An explosion has laid bare a vertical wall above a mysterious opening, and from this opening different gases have passed out and coated the walls with yellow, white, orange, red, and violet incrustations; these hues are remarkably bright and are enhanced by the setting of ebony which surrounds them. 66 The inundations of lava poured out from a series of pits or bocche di fuogo situated in a line below the cone, on the rent from which escaped all that overflowed from Etna in 1886. They are empty monticles, which have the appearance of having been formed of burned coke. They are two, three, and ten metres high, and it is difficult to believe, on looking at them, that they could have given birth to this immense sea of lava which has climbed cones thirty to forty metres high, and which rises with a formidable hill in its middle. "All this coke which we see is not lava, it is only slag. But this slag, these scoriæ, cover everything up, though it would not have been visible had there not been a deep excavation along the course of the lava stream, next to the pits. This great ravine, nearly a kilometre in length, thirty to fifty metres in width, and from four to twelve metres deep, with vertical walls, enabled us to see the internal structure of a lava stream. It is formed by the superposition of alternating layers of compact lava, a yard thick, with black ashes. In certain places we could count five or six layers, one over the other. "It appears, then, that the lava stream, itself the result of the eruption, is formed of sheets of lava, which flow out one after the other and pass one above the other, each covering the scoriæ, or rather a part of the scoriæ of the surface of the preceding layer, without filling the interstices. But while layers of ashes or scoriæ only ten to twenty inches thick separate the lava layers, the sides and ends of the lava streams form great heaps of large pieces of loose coke, amid which one can detect the compact lava." We had left our mules some distance down the mountain, and, while the guide went for them, as we were to return by a different route, I strolled about, enjoying the wondrously beautiful scene far below. A gentle sirocco was blowing, and far down beyond the fields of ashes and cinders a soft, delicate haze hung over the land of the vine and orange, and spread over the deep blue Mediterranean beyond. We returned to Nicolosi in the hot afternoon sun, passing around by the south of Monte Rosso, skirting the right side of the eastern lava stream, whose entire length was about four miles, and whose rough, broken surface is so well represented by the |