showers, as they import fine divided rock very rich in substances
necessary for the growth of plants, have in a measure served to
maintain the fertility of the soil, and by this action have in some
degree compensated for the injury which they occasionally inflict.
Comparing the ravages of the eruptions with those inflicted by war,
unnecessary disease, or even bad politics, and we see that these
natural accidents have been most merciful to man. Many a tyrant has
caused more suffering and death than has been inflicted by these rude
operations of Nature.

From the point of view of the naturalist, Ætna is vastly more
interesting than Vesuvius. The bulk of the cone is more than twenty
times as great as that of the Neapolitan volcano, and the magnitude of
its explosions, as well as the range of phenomena which they exhibit,
incomparably greater. It happens, however, that while human history of
the recorded kind has been intimately bound up with the tiny Vesuvian
cone, partly because the relatively slight nature of its disturbances
permitted men to dwell beside it, the larger Ætna has expelled culture
from the field near its vent, and has done the greater part of its
work in the vast solitude which it has created.[9]

[Footnote 9: In part the excellent record of Vesuvius is due to the fact
that since the early Christian centuries the priests of St. Januarius,
the patron of Naples, have been accustomed to carry his relics in
procession whenever an eruption began. The cessation of the outbreak has
been written down to the credit of the saint, and thus we are provided
with a long story of the successive outbreaks.]

Ætna has been in frequent eruption for a very much longer time than
Vesuvius. In the odes of Pindar, in the sixth century before Christ,