When we consider the amazing quantity of stones and ashes ejected in these and similar instances by volcanic power, we cannot wonder that considerable mountains have frequently been piled up by one single eruption. Thus in the Bay of Baiæ near Naples, Monte Nuovo, a hill 440 feet high, and with a base of more than a mile and a half in circumference, formed, in less than twelve hours, on September 29, 1538; and a few days gave birth to Monte Minardo, near Bronte, on the slopes of Etna, which rises to the still more considerable height of 700 feet. It would be curious to calculate how many thousands of workmen, and what length of time, man would need to raise mounds like these, produced by an almost instantaneous effort of nature. In other cases the expansive power of the elastic vapours, which cast up these prodigious masses from the bowels of the earth, is such as to blow to pieces the volcanic cone through which it seeks its vent. In Quito there is an ancient tradition that Capac Urcu, which means ‘the chief,’ was once the highest volcano near the equator, being higher than Chimborazo, but at the beginning of the fifteenth century a prodigious eruption took place which broke it down. The fragments of trachyte, says Mr. Boussingault, which once formed the conical summit of this celebrated mountain, are at this day spread over the plain. On August 11, 1772, the Pepandajan, in Java, formerly one of the highest mountains of the island, broke out in eruption; the inhabitants of the country around prepared for flight, but, before they could escape, the greater part of its summit was shivered to pieces and covered the neighbourhood with its ruins, so that in the upper part of the Gurat valley forty villages were completely buried. During the dreadful eruption of 1815, the Temboro, in Sumbawa, is said to have lost at least one-third of its height from the explosion of its summit, and similar instances are mentioned as having occurred among the volcanoes of Japan. In the year 1638 a colossal cone called the Peak, in the Isle of Timor, one of the Moluccas, was entirely destroyed by a paroxysmal explosion. The whole mountain, which was before this continually active, and so high that its light was visible, it is said, three hundred miles off, was blown up and replaced by a concavity now containing a lake. Again, according to M. Moreau de Jonnes, in 1718, on March 6–7, at St. Vincent’s, one of the Leeward Isles, the shock of a terrific earthquake was felt, and clouds of ashes were driven into the air, with violent detonations, from a mountain situated at the eastern end of the island. When the eruption had ceased, it was found that the whole mountain had disappeared like the baseless fabric of a dream.