The Volcanoes of Central France

Abstract

THE eruptions of A.D. 458–460, whose showers of pumice or ashes reached and alarmed the city of Vienne, then the capit a of the chief State in Gaul, and led to the institution of the Rogations (now called Litany) and the “Rogation Days,” cannot have proceeded from the province of Auvergne, as Mr. Green supposes (NATURE, May 16). That province, containing about half the French volcanoes, is the most distant of the three volcanic ones from Vienne, and moreover is held to have been quiescent in that age (as well as ever since); because the eminent writer, Sidonius Apollinaris, who had settled there, and wrote a poem on its scenery, betrays no knowledge of its volcanic phenomena. So, at least, Sir Charles Lyell has repeatedly insisted. It is true that, writing before the date of the Vienne calamities, his silence proves nothing; but as fully half the French craters are not in the Auvergne, but between that province and Vienne, namely, in either the Velay or Vivarais, within about fifty miles of that city, and ranged along almost a quadrant (the S.W. quadrant) of its horizon, there can be little doubt that some of them were the scene of the “portentous fires,” and sources of the “Sodomitic showers” that alarmed the Burgun-dian capital, and led St. Mamertus to institute these fasts. Of Mamertus himself there remain no writings, and the memory of any historic eruptions in France appears to have died out from that very century to the present; though none in all history were better attested, none within many centuries of Pliny's even so well. For it is strange that no later chroniclers mention anything but the earthquakes and some fires of buildings; the sole authorities for the eruptions being their contemporaries, the above Sidonius and the bishop who succeeded Mamertus in his see, and these two being the sole men in Gaul of that generation whereof any document remains. The former writes to Mamertus himself a very fulsome, adulatory, but necessarily a materially true memoir of the facts; and the latter allusively recounts them in a sermon to the very flock among whom the observances had begun. It seems impossible to conceive better witnesses to any event whatever, and they are literally all the contemporary writers extant.