Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Climbing the last few hundred feet, however, Evelyn saw
that this was no ordinary mountain:
The mountain consists of a double top, the one pointed very
sharp, and commonly appearing above any clouds, the other
blunt. Here as we approached, we met many large gaping
clefts and chasms, out of which issued such sulphureous
blasts and smoke, that we durst not stand long near them.
Having gained the very summit, I laid myself down to
look over and into that most frightful and terrible vorago,
a stupendous pit of near three miles in circuit and half a
mile in depth, by a perpendicular hollow cliff (like that
from the highest part of Dover Castle), with now and then
a craggy prominency jetting out. The area at the bottom
is plain like an even floor, which seems to be made by the
wind circling the ashes by its eddy blasts.
After intensive examining and contemplating of volcanoes
by travellers across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
it comes as something of a surprise to read that Dr Johnson's
definition of 'Volcano' in his
Dictionary
, first published in 1755,
is merely 'A burning mountain'. The archaic ring of these words,
picking up as they do from Kircher's 'Burning and Fire-Vomit-
ing Mountains', already nearly a century old, reflects nothing of
the scientific progress of the preceding hundred years, and the
developing understanding that volcanoes were very much more
than mountains that appeared to burn. If not from Kircher,
Johnson took his definition from philosophical writings such as
those of the seventeenth-century scholar Thomas Browne, whom
he quotes in his literary illustrations of the word: 'Navigators tell
us there is a burning mountain in an island and many volcanos
and fiery hills.' Johnson goes on to cite another seventeenth-
century writer, Sir Samuel Garth, who used Homer as his source:
When the Cyclopes oe'r their anvils sweat,
From the volcanos gross eruptions rise,
And curling sheets of smoke obscure the skies.
