Abstract
AN unlucky error, perhaps mine, in the letter on the “Volcanoes of Central France,” p. 80, will quite prevent any reader finding the paper I mentioned of May 1865, which, instead of being in the Gentleman's Magazine, was in the Englishman's Magazine, a short-lived periodical, begun and ended, I think, with that year. As your two correspondents, Prof. Corfield and the Rev. Mr. Webb, like the writer of that paper, repeat the late Dr. Daubeny's most marvellous “conclusion” that there might have been nothing more eruptive in the phenomena than “bursting out of flames” from earthquake fissures, and even that the fires mentioned by Sidonius and Avitus might be “domestic conflagrations,” may I briefly indicate the grounds that make these suppositions to me incredible? These fires, as named in the portions of each document that I have translated—quite distinct from the conflagration of some public building on the Easter festival of a previous year, which both writers afterwards relate at greater length as an earlier and less known case of successful prayer by Mamertus, the memory of which had encouraged him under these “prodigies” and “portents,” the ignes (not incendia) that both writers make a chief or the chief part of the “terrors”—(Sidonius, indeed, names the earthquakes before them, but Avitus twice over puts the fires first)—these were crebri and assidui, continual for two or three years, yet not a word of what they fed on or what valuables they destroyed, and they were only sape flammati. Their being so sometimes is plainly named by Sidonius as an unusual and greater portent. Now, I never heard of any “domestic” fires that were not “flammati” whereas volcanic eruptions, even severe, seldom if ever involve flame truly so called, though their strongly illuminated smoke may often by night be mistaken for flames, and has led them to be called in extreme cases, as Sidonius here said, sape flammati. He adds that when thus “flammati” they did, or rather threatened to do, the only mischief named as even apprehended from them at the capital, the endangering frail roofs by a load of ashes thrown over, superjecto favillarum monte. Now, surely this is not an effect of any ædile conflagrations however often repeated (a repetition that would anywhere have been regarded rather as suspicious of incendiarism than as “prodigious” and preternatural). Nor would any such accidents lead Avitus to ask in his sermon to those who remembered all, “Who would not dread the Sodomitic showers?” Again, Mr. Webb conceives that earthquakes might not only drive the wealthier part of the population out of the city, “but, as it would seem, the beasts into it!” I never heard of shocks producing so singular an effect as driving any living thing into cities or buildings, and cannot conceive what natural event could so drive them, unless what is here by both witnesses implied, “Sodomitic showers?” of hot or cumbering favillæ Such showers, which we know to be often carried, from eruptions involving no lava, scores or even hundreds of miles, in the direction of the prevailing winds, would be carried from any of the well-known cones of the Forèz or Vivarais, towards, or even far beyond, Vienne; and wild animals, fleeing north-eastward, would have no refuge but under roofs; and if private house doors were habitually shut (as now in England) might crowd into the colonnades (fori latera) of that capital city. This incursion of the wild deer, bears, and wolves into towns was so well remembered as to become, in the later chroniclers, Gregory of Tours, &c., dwelt upon among the main “prodig es” of the time, along with the earthquakes and burnings of buildings, though any other fires cease to be implied; and the reason of this is obvious on comparing their accounts. They all copy one another, and the earliest, whose sole authorities were those two pompous and involved writers, mis-read them exactly as our moderns (except Sir F. Palgrave) appear to have done, confusing together the fires of the “prodigies,” that led to the Rogation fasts with the earlier ædile conflagration at some Easter, said to have been prayed out by Mamertus, which occupies both the writer and preacher immediately after, and at greater length than these well-known “terrors” remembered by those they addressed personally.
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GARBETT, E. The Volcanoes of Central France. Nature 6, 102 (1872). https://doi.org/10.1038/006102a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/006102a0
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