DESTRUCTION OF THE CITY OF

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XXI, Issue 26, 5 April 1862, Page 3

DESTRUCTION OF THE CITY OF

TORRE DEL GRECO.

Tho following account of the deatruotion of the City of Torre del Greco by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, is furnished by a Naples correspondent of a London paper. Writing on the 28th of December last, he says : — The destruction of a city, which numbered 22,000 inhabitants is so startling a fact, that I trust I shall not weary you by sending you some statistics which I have this week gathered on the spot. Covered with snow, vomiting ashes still like a ten thousand horse-power factory chimney, with a ruined city lying at its feet, such is the spectacle which Vesuvius at this moment presents. Unable to restrain my curiosity to know what was passing behind the clouds of ashes which intervene between us and the mountain, I went down again on Tuesday last, and directed myself to the committee who had been sitting in permanence since the Bth instant. The municipal building, a fine old historical edifice of the time of the Arrogans, had been destroyed, so that tho committee waa sitting in a suppressed monastery on the outskirts of the town, and not on the bed of old lava. The cloisters and the stairs wore filled with squalid misery, which had come there for relief, and the syndic and his coadjutors, to whose courtesy I am much indebted, gave me the following information : — Out of a population of 22,000, 15,000 are fugitives. Between fifty and sixty houses have already fallen, and 320 are falling ; the rest are more or less injured. Out of eleven churches four only are uninjured ; but there is another fearful source of danger, the sulphurous exhalations which are emitted in every direction, and which render houses, in other respect 3 comparatively safe, uninhabitable. By _ these exhalations five or six persons, and nil the animals, such as cats, doge, mice, and birds, and the fishes in the sea, have already been killed. In fact, two-thirds of the city have been destroyed. The committee begged me to appeal to the British public in their behalf, or at least to Italians resident in England, and then sent two of their members to accompany mo again over the city. My companions took me through a narrow lane, on either side of which the houses were on the eve ot falling, down to an orange garden belonging to one of them, at the furthest extremity of which gaped a crater twenty feet wide and as many deep. Planks were thrown across, and, getting upon them, I looked and saw the walls of a church which had been destroyed in 1794, graves which had given up their dead, for the skeletons had been removed as soon aa discovered, and the frescoed walls of the inner chamber of some house. The smell of Bulphur was here strong, and yet stronger in the atreeta through which I afterwards passed. Dead animala lay here and there, and amidst these signa of mortality and sign-posts of clanger, which met the eye at every turn, while the soil was still heaving beneath our feet, while "Vesuvius was throwing out more violently than ever, and when at midnight only tho poor who had returned had fled from their houses alarmed by another shock, I met some persons coming in with their household goods on their backs. A few steps brought me to the sea, which was boiling furiously for some distance like a cauldron, not the effect, as I at first thought, of springs of fresh water gushing up, but of volcanic action, and the smell of the gases escaping was so intense that I found it necessary for Bafety to cover my face with a handkerchief. Here I met my friends Cappocci, Guiscardi, and Palmieri, who had come over as a scientific commission to make investigation. They bottled up the gases on the spot, which they reported to be carbonic acid and carburetted hydrogen. How long the eruption might continue Palmieri had no means of calculating ; it was going on as violently aa ever, and his sismograph was always registering. From Sunday until Monday morning at five, a.m., there had been eight shocks ; and from that time to when he spoke to me they had been continual. The soil had risen five palms, and the subsidence might be attended with great danger. " Until this has taken place," he said to my municipal conductors, "you must not think of rebuilding, and you must carefully note the fissures in the houses and tho streets, to observe whether they approximate." The same writer adds, in a letter of the 31st : — I am sorry to report fresh accidents near Resina, attended with the loss of life. A little above the city is the bed of lava of 1682, close to the church of Santa Maria Appagliano, and from this on Friday night, at ten o'clock, issued a quantity of carbonic acid gas, which prostrated five workmen, who were daily employed there in cutting out masses of the lava for building. One man, who was dragged away rapidly, recovered, but the four others were killed. Cozzolino, theVeauviua guide, tella me that after spending the day on the mountain with some scientific man, he returned by this road, and that both were compelled to fly for their lives, leaving a barometer and a bag of instruments- on the spot. There were lying on the ground a cat, a dog, and three birds, which had been destroyed by the gas.

Expxosite Paraefine. — Mr. W. Herapath, of Bristol, makes the public acquainted with an easy method of proving whether the oil is dangerous or not. Let two or three drops of it be allowed to fall upon a plate or saucer, and apply to them a lighted match ; if the flame spreads over the surface of the drops the oil should on no account be used, as it will under any circumstances prove explosive. The genuine paraffine or petroline will not burn unless upon a wick. — Medical Times. What is Coal? — Itia evident that it ia not easy to frame a precise definition of the term coal, either in a commercial or in a scientific sense. The substances to which the term coal ia usually applied differ widely both in physical and chemical characters. All coal result 3 from the decomposition of vegetable mutter, under special conditions, and in degrees of decomposition there is every stage. Thus, at one extreme is lignite, some varieties of which clo3ely resemble wood, botli in composition and appearance; and at the other ia anthracite, which consists almost wholly of carbon, and is in all respects unlike wood. Again, the proportion of earthy matter, or ash, in coal is subject to great variation. Suppose a mineral to consist of five per cent, of coal-like, black, combustible matter, in all respects similar to undoubted coal, and of ninetyfive per cent, of earthy matter, no one would designate such a minernl as coal. Then the question arises, what ia the maximum amount of earthy matter which can exist in coal ? No definite answer can be given. In the present state of science I do not believe it possible to propose an exact definition of the terra coal. Geological position does not aiford satisfactory grounds for a precise definition, for the mineral which was lately the subject of investigation at the trial in Edinburgh, occurs in association with coal of the true coal-meaßures ; and true coal, bo far aa may be inferred from the assemblage of chemical and physical characters, is met with in other and more recent geological formations. Perhaps the nearest approach to a definition would be the following :— Coal ia a solid mineral substance, more or leas easily combustible, varying in colour irom dark brown to black, opaque, except in extremely thin slices, brittle, not fusible without decomposition, not sensibly soluble in ether, benzole, chloroform, or turpentine, not containing sufficient earthy matter to render it incapable of being applied with advantage as a Bource of heat in ordinary fire-places, or in furnaces. — Dr. J. Percy. Since the termination of tho Trent dispute, there have scarcely been any speeches on political topics, if we except one by Mr. Gilpin, one by Mr. Gladstone who paid a visit a few days ago to Leith and Edinburgh, and one by Mr. MasF.ey. Mr. Gilpin argued on the American side in reference to the affair of the Trent, and praised Mr. Seward's conduct and his reply to the British Government. Mr. Gladstone told the merchants of Leith that he " does not despond " of a decent budget, that the French Treaty has increased trade by £8,000,000 a year, and that the British people ought to be more tolerant than they are in their strictures on American action. Mr. Massey spoke to his constituents at Salford on the hopeless and unpractical character of the civil war in America. He said it was a " war which no man was able to understand, a war which had no beginning, and which would have no end, which had no cause, and which could have no effect, the most Oo3tly and most ferocious war that had ever afflicted mankind/' — Some Newt, January 2,7 »