The Canon Recupero has been alluded to above; he accompanied Hamilton, Brydone, and others to the summit of the mountain, and he was employed by the Government to report on the flood which, in 1755, descended with extraordinary violence through the Val del Bove. Beyond this, Recupero does not appear to have published anything concerning Etna, although it was well known that he had plenty of materials. He died in 1778, and it was not till the year 1815 that his results were published under the title of _Storia Naturale et Generale dell' Etna, del Canonico Giuseppe Recupero.--Opera Postuma_. This work consists of two bulky quarto volumes, the first of which is devoted to a general description of the mountain, the second to a history of the eruptions, and an account of the products of eruptions. Some idea may be formed of the extreme prolixity of the author if we mention that two chapters, together containing twelve quarto pages, are devoted to the discussion of the height of Etna, while the first volume is terminated by sixty-three closely printed pages of annotations. A few rough woodcuts accompany the volumes; a view of the mountain which, as usual, is out of all reason as regards abruptness of ascent, and a _carta oryctographia di Mongibello_ in which the trend of the coast-line between Catania and Taormina is altogether inexact, complete the illustrations of this most detailed of histories. During the years 1814-1816 Captain Smyth, acting under orders from the Admiralty, made a survey of the coast of Sicily, and of the adjacent islands. At this time the Mediterranean charts were very defective; some places on the coast of Sicily were mapped as much as twenty miles out of their true position, and even the exact positions of the observatories at Naples, Palermo, and Malta were not known. Among other results, Smyth carefully determined the latitude and longitude of Etna, accurately measured its height, and examined the surroundings of the mountain. His results were published in 1824, and are often regarded as the most accurate that we possess.