Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 June 1879 — Mount Etna. [ARTICLE]

Mount Etna.

The eruptions of Mount Etna, though less frequent than those of Vesuvius, are far more violent. Its great size—the height of the cone being nearly 11,000 feet, and its circumference eighty-seven miles—renders the overflow of its lava a very formidable affair. During one of the earlier eruptions the lava, when checked by the walls of Catania, fifty feet in height, accumulated till it actually overflowed them and devastated the entire town. On this occasion a peasant, cut off by a stream of lava that encircled the rock on which he stood, escaped by leaping upon a bowlder that had fallen into the burning stream and thence springing on to the other bank, with no other injury than the loss of the whole skin of his face by the intense heat. The earliest recorded eruption of Etna is one mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, as coeval with the Trojan war. The next are three eruptions referred to by Thucydides, 425 and 475 B. C., and one at an earlier time not specified. These, added to the later recorded eruptions to the present time, make seventy in all. The most important are those of 11G9, 1669, 1755, 1787, 1792,1852 and 1868.