ETNA - A History of the Mountain and of Its Eruptions

WHILE preparing an account of MOUNT ETNA for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I was surprised to find that there exists no single work in the English language devoted to the history of the most famous volcano in the world. I was consequently induced to considerably enlarge the Encyclopaedia article, and the following pages are the result. The facts recorded have been collected from various sources-German, French, Italian, and English, and from my own observations made during the summer of 1877.

Large print 15 point font.

**************

Excerpt:

Etna is frequently alluded to by classical writers. By the poets it was sometimes feigned to be the prison of the giant Enceladus or Typhon, sometimes the forge of Hephaistos, and the abode of the Cyclops.

It is strange that Homer, who has so minutely described certain portions of the contiguous Sicilian coast, does not allude to Etna. This has been thought by some to be a proof that the mountain was in a quiescent state during the period which preceded and coincided with the time of Homer.

Pindar (B.C. 522-442) is the first writer of antiquity who has described Etna. In the first of the Pythian Odes for Hieron, of the town of Aitna, winner in the chariot race in B.C. 474, he exclaims: . . . "He (Typhon) is fast bound by a pillar of the sky, even by snowy Etna, nursing the whole year's length her dazzling snow. Whereout pure springs of unapproachable fire are vomited from the inmost depths: in the daytime the lava-streams pour forth a lurid rush of smoke; but in the darkness a red rolling flame sweepeth rocks with uproar to the wide deep sea . . . That dragon-thing (Typhon) it is that maketh issue from beneath the terrible fiery flood."

Thucydides (B.C. 471-402) alludes in the last lines of the Third Book to several early eruptions of the mountain in the following terms: "In the first days of this spring, the stream of fire issued from Etna, as on former occasions, and destroyed some land of the Catanians, who live upon Mount Etna, which is the largest mountain in Sicily. Fifty years, it is said, had elapsed since the last eruption, there having been three in all since the Hellenes have inhabited Sicily."