ve generally conjectured that the whole
group sprung up from the ground at once, like the soldiers of Cadmus
when he sowed the dragon's teeth. As well might they endeavor to
persuade us that on these Phlegraean Fields, as the poets feigned, the
giants warred with Jove, ere yet the puny race of mortals were in being.

_Modern eruptions of Vesuvius._--For nearly a century after the birth of
Monte Nuovo, Vesuvius continued in a state of tranquillity. There had
been no violent eruption for 492 years; and it appears that the crater
was then exactly in the condition of the present extinct volcano of
Astroni, near Naples. Bracini, who visited Vesuvius not long before the
eruption of 1631, gives the following interesting description of the
interior:--"The crater was five miles in circumference, and about a
thousand paces deep: its sides were covered with brushwood, and at the
bottom there was a plain on which cattle grazed. In the woody parts wild
boars frequently harbored. In one part of the plain, covered with ashes,
were three small pools, one filled with hot and bitter water, another
salter than the sea, and a third hot, but tasteless."[517] But at length
these forests and grassy plains were consumed, being suddenly blown into
the air, and their ashes scattered to the winds. In December, 1631,
seven streams of lava poured at once from the crater, and overflowed
several villages, on the flanks and at the foot of the mountain. Resina,
partly built over the ancient site of Herculaneum, was consumed by the
fiery torrent. Great floods of mud were as destructive as the lava
itself,--no uncommon occurrence during these catastrophes; for such is
the violence of rains produced by the evolutions of aqueous vapor, that
torrents of water descend the cone, and becoming charged with impalpable
volcanic dust, and rolling along loose ashes, acquire sufficient
consistency to deserve their ordinary appellation of "aqueous lavas."

A brief period of repose ensued, which lasted only until the year 1666,
from which time to the present there has been a constant series of
eruptions, with rarely an interval of rest exceeding ten years. During
these three centuries, no irregular volcanic agency has convulsed other
points in this district. Brieslak remarked, that such irregular
convulsions had occurred in the Bay of Naples in every second century;
as, for example, the eruption of the Solfatara, in the twelfth; of the
lava of Arso, in Ischia, in the