From this date onward the Mountain became very active in contrast with its previous condition of lethargy, and throughout the whole of the eighteenth century there were frequent eruptions, many of them on a vast scale. All these outbursts have been carefully recorded and commented upon, for naturally the scientists of a great city like Naples were intensely interested in the passing phases of their own volcano. During the latter half of this century all the phenomena have been described for us by Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador at the Court of the Two Sicilies, the versatile diplomatist who eventually married the beautiful but frail Emma Hart. During his long period of residence in Naples, Sir William made no fewer than fifty-eight explorations of the crater alone, besides carefully studying every peculiarity visible upon the sides of the Mountain. He was, of course, a close observer of the great eruptions of 1766-7, and also of the still greater convulsion of 1779, which, strangely enough, occurred on the seventeenth centenary of the awakening of the Mountain from its pre-historic slumbers. On this occasion, Hamilton, accompanied by a Mr Bowdler of Bath, had the temerity to track the streams of flowing lava to their hidden source by walking over the rough unyielding crust of stones and earth that had formed upon the surface of the molten stream, as it slowly trickled down hill at the rate of about a mile an hour. The adventurous pair of Englishmen were successful in their quest, and Sir William thus describes the fountain-head of the fiery streams that he found a quarter of a mile distant from the top of the cone. “The liquid and red-hot matter bubbled up violently, with a hissing and crackling noise, like that which attends the playing off of an artificial firework; and by the continued splashing up of the vitrified matter, a kind of arch, or dome, was formed over the crevice from whence the lava issued; it was cracked in many parts, and appeared red-hot within, like a heated oven. This hollowed hillock might be about fifteen feet high, and the lava that ran from under it was received into a regular channel, raised upon a sort of wall of scoriae and cinders, almost perpendicularly, of about a height of eight or ten feet, resembling much an ancient aqueduct.”