called the _fertile_, the _woody_, and the _desert_
regions. The first of these, comprising the delightful country around
the skirts of the mountain, is well cultivated, thickly inhabited, and
covered with olives, vines, corn, fruit-trees, and aromatic herbs.
Higher up, the woody region encircles the mountain--an extensive forest
six or seven miles in width, affording pasturage for numerous flocks.
The trees are of various species, the chestnut, oak, and pine being most
luxuriant; while in some tracts are groves of cork and beech. Above the
forest is the desert region, a waste of black lava and scoriae; where, on
a kind of plain, rises a cone of eruption to the height of about eleven
hundred feet, from which sulphureous vapors are continually evolved.

_Cones produced by lateral eruption._--The most grand and original
feature in the physiognomy of Etna is the multitude of minor cones which
are distributed over its flanks, and which are most abundant in the
woody region. These, although they appear but trifling irregularities
when viewed from a distance as subordinate parts of so imposing and
colossal a mountain, would, nevertheless, be deemed hills of
considerable altitude in almost any other region. Without enumerating
numerous monticules of ashes thrown out at different points, there are
about eighty of these secondary volcanoes, of considerable dimensions;
fifty-two on the west and north, and twenty-seven on the east side of
Etna. One of the largest, called Monte Minardo, near Bronte, is upwards
of 700 feet in height, and a double hill near Nicolosi, called Monti
Rossi, formed in 1669, is 450 feet high, and the base two miles in
circumference; so that it somewhat exceeds in size Monte Nuovo, before
described. Yet it ranks only as a cone of the second magnitude amongst
those produced by the lateral eruptions of Etna. On looking down from
the lower borders of the desert region, these volcanoes present us with
one of the most delightful and characteristic scenes in Europe. They
afford every variety of height and size, and are arranged in beautiful
and picturesque groups. However uniform they may appear when seen from
the sea, or the plains below, nothing can be more diversified than their
shape when we look from above into their craters, one side of which is
generally broken down. There are, indeed, few objects in nature more
picturesque than a wooded volcanic crater. The cones situated in the
higher parts of the forest