THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT VESUVIUS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 113, 27 March 1862, Page 6

THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT VESUVIUS.

A Naples correspondent of the Times sends some further details respecting the eruption of Mount Vesuvius', and especially the destruction 'of Torrel de Greco. Writing on the 28th ult, lie say's :—

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 some statistics .which I have this week gathered on the spot. Covered with snow, vomiting ashes still like a - ten-tliousand-horse power factory chimney, with a ruined city lying at its feet, such is the spectacle which Vesuvius at this moment presence. Unable to restrain my enriosity to know what was passing behind the clouds of ashes which intervened between us and the mountain, I went down again on Tuesday last, and directed myself to the committee which had been sitting in permanncr since the Sth instant. The municipal building, a fine old historical edifice, of the time of the Arogous, had been destroyed, so that the committee was sitting in a suppressed monetery on the outskirts of the town, and not on the bed of "old lava. The cloisters and the stairs were filled with squalid misery wiibli had come there for relief; and the Syndic and his coadjutors, to whose courtesy I am much indebted, Kayo me the following information :—Out of a papulatbn of 22,000, 15,U00 are fugitives. Between fifty a.\d sixty houses have already fullun, and 320 are falling ,- the rest are more or less injurad. Out of eleven ehuivh s four only are uninjured ; but there is another fearful source of danger—the sulphurous exhalations which arc emitted in every direction, and which render hous.es, in other respects comparatively sale, uninhabitable. Uy these exhalations, five or six persons, and all the animals, such as cats, dogs, mice, and birds, aad the fishes in the .sea, have already been kill j.l. In fact, two thud? of the city have Leen destro;,el. The io:nmittee becged me to appeal, to the British pnMic in their behalf, or at least to Italians resident in England, and then sent two of their membars to accompany me again ovor the city. I uiuf-fi confine myself to such, new features as I liavo not yet described, and they are of great interest. My companions took 7ne through a. narrow lane, on each side of which the houses were on the eve of falling, down to an orange; garden belonging to one of them, at the further extremity of wlueli gaped a crater twenty feet wide and its many deep. Planks were thrown across, and getting upon tham I looked in and saw the walls of a church which had been de.stroved in 1794, graves whiolv had given \ip their dead — 'for the skeletons had been removed as soon as discovered—and the frescoed walls of the inner chamber of some house. Th§ smell of sulphur was here strong, aad yet stronger, almost jusiilTerable, ijj the streets through which I afterwards passed. Dead animals lay here and there,-and amidst these signs of mortality and sign-posts of danger which met the eye at every turn, while the soil was still heaving beneath our-feist, while Vesuvius was throwing out more violently than ever, and when at midnight only the poor who had. returned had flad from their houses alarmed by another shock; I met some persons comins in with'their household goods oa their kicks. A few steps brought me to the sea, which was boiling furiously forsoms distanca like a cauldron, not the effect, aa I at first though £,'-- of springs of fresh water gushing up, but of volcanic action, and the smell of the gases so escaping was so intense that I, found it necessary for safety to cover my face with a handkerchief. Hers I met my friends, Cappociii, (Juis(sirdi, and Palmieri, who lind come over as a scientific commission to make invertiuatiom. They bottle 1 up' the gasss on the spot, which they to be carbonic acid and carburetted hydrogen. How long the eruption.might continue Palmieri had no means off calculating ;it was going on as violently as ever, and his sisinograph was always registering. From Sunday until Monday morning at five there had been eight shocV.s, and from that time to when he spoketo me they had been continual. The soil had risen fire palms, and the subsidence might be attended with greater 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 houso3 and the streets, to observe whether they approximate.

On tub Natural Dissemination of Gold.—M Eckfeldt, the principal assayer of the United States mint at Philadelphia, lias lately made several interesting examinations, lending to show tiie very wide distribution of gold. Passing over the ■ evidence respecting its presence in various galenas, in inetalic lead, copper, silver, antimony, &c, we recite the folr lowing, perhaps the most curious result of all :— Underneath the paved city of Philadelphia, there lies a deposit of clay, whose area, by a probable estimate, would measure over three miles square, enabling us to figure out the convenient sum of ten square wiles. The average depth is believed to be not less than fif* teen feet. The inquiry was started whether gold was diffused in this earthy bed. From a contra! locality which might afford a fair assay for the whole, the cellar of the new market house in Market-street, near Eleventh-street, we dug out some of the clay at a depth of fourteen feet, where it could not have been an artificial deposit. The weight of 130 grammes was dried and duly treated, and yielded one eighth of a milligramme of gold; a very decided quantity on a fine assay balance. It was afterwards ascertained that the clay in its .natural moisture loses about fifteen ! per cent, by drying. So that, as it lies in the ground I the clay contains one part of gold in 1,224,000. This experiment was repeated upon clay taken from ' a brickyard in the suburbs of the city," with nearly the same result. In order to calculate with some certainty the value of this body of wealth, we cut out blocks of the clay, and found that on an average, a cubic foot, as it lies in the ground, weighs 120 pounds, as near as may be; making the specific gravity 1"9 I. The assay gives seven-tenths of a grain, say 3 cents' worth of gold to the cubic foot. . Assuming tbe data already given, we get ISO millions of cubic feet of clay under our streets and houses, in which securely lies 120,000,000 of dollars. And if, as is pretty certain, the corporate limits of the city would afford eight times this bulk of clay, we have more gold than has yet. been brought, according to the statistics, from California and Australia. It is also apparent, that every time a cart load of clay is hauled out of a cellar, enough gold goes with it to pay for the carting. And, if the bricks which front our houses could have brought to their surface, in the form of gold leaf, the tunonnt of gold which they contain, we should have the glittering show of two square inches en every brick. — Scientific American. "Coinage of the Last Ten Yuaks.—The following figures are interesting as a measure of the commercial activity of Great Britain :—Within the last ten years there have " been' coined at the Mint 48,911,848 sovereigns, 14,410,569 half sovereigns, 466 crowns, 1493 ' half-crowns, 15,633,372 florins,----23,025,606 shillings, 21,735,183 sixpences, 1,880,874 groats, 41,580 fourpences, 13,605,101 threepence's, 4Y,520 silvertwopences, and 7S.4QS silver pence. The copper and bronze money coined has been '2*3,232,334 pence, •35,739,421 halfpence, 22,456,27(5 furthings, and 8,635,77.6' half-farthings." . ■ -• •. ■