In October 1871, when I joined my friend Anton Dohrn at Naples in order to study the marine creatures of the beautiful bay, Vesuvius was in the proud possession of a splendid cone, completing its graceful outline. A little steam-cloud hung about one side of the cone during the day, and as night came on Vesuvius used, as we said, to "light his cigar." In fact, a very small quantity of molten lava was at that time flowing from the side of the ash-cone, about 100 ft. from its summit, and this gave a most picturesque effect as we watched it from our balcony high up on Pausilippo, when the sun set. It was a friendly sort of beacon, far away on the commanding mountain's top, which was answered by the lighting up of a thousand lamps along the coast, and by innumerable flaming faggots in the fishermen's boats moving across the bay, drawing to their light strange fishes, to be impaled by the long tridents of the skilful spearmen. That little beacon light on Vesuvius increased in volume in the course of three weeks, and was supplemented by other flaming streams and by showers of red-hot stones from the crater. This small "eruption" was the precursor by six months of the great eruption of the end of April 1872, and I spent a night on Vesuvius during its progress, and looked into the crater from which the glowing masses of rock were being belched forth. Not long before I went, in 1871, to Naples I had spent some weeks in visiting the extinct volcanoes of the Auvergne and of the Eiffel, and I was eager to examine the still living Vesuvius. In the first week of October I made an excursion to the crater of Vesuvius in company with the son of a Russian admiral, whose name, "Popoff," was under the circumstances unpleasantly suggestive. We examined some black slaglike masses of old lava-streams, and struggled up the loose sandy ash-cone (there was no "funicular" in those days), and prodded with our sticks the few yards of molten lava which emerged from the side of the cone about 100 ft. from the summit. On Nov. 1 my friend Anton Dohrn (who was then negotiating with the Naples Municipality for a site in the Villa Nazionale on which to erect the great Zoological Station and Aquarium, now so well known) was with me and some Neapolitan acquaintances looking at Vesuvius across the bay from Pausilippo, where we had established ourselves, when we noticed that a long line of steam was rising from the lower part of the ash-cone and that puffs of steam were issuing at intervals from the crater. "Dio mio! Dio di Dio!" cried the Neapolitans in terror, and expressed their intention of leaving Naples without an hour's delay. As night fell a new glowing line of fire appeared far down near the base of the ash-cone, whilst what looked in the distance like sparks from a furnace, but were really red-hot stones–each as big as a Gladstone bag–were thrown every two or three minutes from the crater.