times, deep-coloured flames burst forth with huge stones and ashes, and you heard a noise like the discharge of a number of great artillery. It appeared to me as if Typheus and Enceladus from Ischia and Etna with innumerable giants, or those from the Campi Phlegrei (which, according to the opinions of some, were situated in this neighbourhood), were come to wage war again with Jupiter. The natural historians may perhaps reasonably say, that the wise poets meant no more by giants, than exhalations, shut up in the bowels of the earth, which, not finding a free passage, open one by their own force and impulse, and form mountains, as those which occasioned this eruption have been seen to do; and methought I saw those torrents of burning smoak that Pindar describes in an eruption of Etna, now called Mon Gibello, in Sicily; in imitation of which, as some say, Virgil wrote these lines: "Ipse sed horrificis juxta tonat AEtna ruinis, &c. "After the stones and ashes with clouds of thick smoak had been sent up, by the impulse of the fire and windy exhalation (as you see in a great cauldron that boils), into the middle region of the air, overcome by their own natural weight, when from distance the strength they had received from impulse was spent, rejected likewise by the cold and unfriendly region, you saw them fall thick, and, by degrees, the condensed smoak clear away, raining ashes with water and stones of different sizes, according to the distance from the place: then, by degrees, with the same noise and smoak, it threw out stones and ashes again, and so on by fits. This continued two days and nights, when the smoak and force of the fire began to abate. The fourth day, which was Thursday, at 22 o'clock, there was so great an eruption, that, as I was in the gulph of Puzzole, coming from Ischia, and not far from Misenum, I saw, in a short time, many columns of smoak shoot up, with the most terrible noise I ever heard, and, bending over the sea, came near our boat, which was four miles or more from the place of their birth; and the quantity of ashes, stones, and smoak, seemed as if they would cover the whole earth and sea. Stones, great and small, and ashes more or less, according to the impulse of the fire and exhalations, began to fall, so that a great part of this country was covered with ashes; and many, that have seen it, say, they reached the vale of Diana, and some parts of Calabria, which are more than 150 miles from Pozzuolo. The Friday and Saturday nothing but a little smoak appeared; so that many, taking courage, went upon the spot, and say, that with the stones and ashes thrown up, a mountain has been formed in that valley, not less than three miles in circumference, and almost as high as the Monte Barbaro, which is near it, covering the Canettaria, the castle of Trepergule, all those buildings and the greatest part of the baths that were about them; extending South towards the sea, North as far as the