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Only a sermon of the Revd Richard Bentley takes Johnson to even
the mildest scientific explanation, that 'Subterraneous minerals
ferment and cause earthquakes, and cause furious eruptions of
volcanos, and tumble down broken rocks.'
We need not expect Samuel Johnson to engage embryonic
science in his definitions; after all, his entry for 'Chemistry' directs
the reader to 'Chymistry' where his definition gives us:
derived by some from
, to melt; by
others from an oriental word, kema, black. According to
the supposed etymology, it is written with y or e.
, juice, or
That is as far as he goes on the subject. A 'chymist', according to
Johnson, is 'a professor of chymistry; a philosopher by fire'. So in
the mid-eighteenth century, with the pioneering natural
philosophers Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke well behind him,
Johnson was as non-committal as it is possible to be.
Kircher's treatise The Vulcanos was followed by the 1743
English translation of The Natural History of Mount Vesuvius
by the Neapolitan physician Francesco Serao (1702-1783). This
gave a full account of the processes by which Vesuvius changed
its shape from eruption to eruption, a mutation that would not
come to be fully described until Sir William Hamilton published
his Campi Phlegraei , with gouaches by Peter Fabris, 33 years later.
Serao writes:
The eruption of 1730 deserves our notice, not on account of
its fury, but because it made a sensible alteration of the summit
of the Volcano, for a great quantity of combustible and liquid
matter, settling near the mouth of the Volcano, rendered the
top much higher and more pointed than it was before.ยน9
Serao's close observation of the eruption continues with the words:
Another particularity remarkable in the same eruption was,
that the flames were much brighter and livelier than usual,
and rose into the air to a prodigious height. The fiery torrent
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