d
of May they were carried by ship to Messina, whence, with the exception
of Dolomieu, they embarked for the coast of France. Dolomieu had been an
object of the hatred of the Neapolitan court since 1783, when he
revealed to the grand master of his order its designs against Malta, and
the calumnies of his enemies on that island served now as a pretext for
his detention. He was confined in a pestilential dungeon, where, clothed
in rags, and having nothing but a little straw for a bed, he languished
during twenty-one months. Dolomieu, however, did not abandon himself to
despair. Deprived of writing materials, he made a piece of wood his pen,
and with the smoke of his lamp for ink he wrote upon the margins of a
Bible, the only book he still possessed, his treatise _Sur la
philosophie mineralogique et sur l'espece minerale_ (1801). Friends
entreated, but in vain, for his liberty; it was with difficulty that
they succeeded in furnishing him with a little assistance, and it was
only by virtue of a special clause in the treaty between France and
Naples that, on the 15th of March 1801, he was released. On his arrival
in France he commenced the duties of the chair of mineralogy at the
museum of natural history, to which, after the death of Daubenton, he
had been elected in January 1800. His course of lectures concluded, he
revisited Switzerland. Returning thence he reached the residence of his
brother-in-law at Chateau-Neuf, in the department of Saone-et-Loire,
where he was seized with a fever, to which in a few days he succumbed,
on the 26th of November 1801.

Dolomieu's geological theories are remarkable for originality and
boldness of conception. The materials constituting the primordial globe
he held to have arranged themselves according to their specific
gravities, so as to have constituted a fluid central sphere, a solid
crust external to this, next a stratum of water, and lastly the
atmosphere. Where water penetrated through the crust, solidification
took place in the underlying fluid mass, which enlarging in consequence
produced rifts in the superincumbent rocks. Water rushing down through
the rifts became decomposed, and the resulting effervescence occasioned
submarine volcanoes. The crust of the earth he believed to be
continually increasing in thickness, owing to the deposition of aqueous
rocks, and to the gradual solidification of the molten interior, so that
the volcanic eruptions and other geological phenomena of fo