Etna

or Aetna, Mount, a volcano situated on the shore of the island of Sicily. It is the largest active volcano in Europe. It is a huge mountain mass rising directly from the coast to a height of 10,835 feet,--a half higher than Mt. Washington. A large number of auxiliary craters are situated like bubbles around the upper part of the cone. The base of the mountain is about thirty miles in diameter. Like other volcanic soils, the slopes are fertile, and are occupied by villages whose inhabitants are engaged in the cultivation of figs, dates, oranges, and olives. A higher belt produces the chestnut, birch, beech, and pine. Not less than 400 eruptions have been recorded, several of them destructive to human life. In 1169, 15,000 persons are said to have been buried beneath the streams of lava. In 1669, 10,000; in 1693, 60,000 lives were lost. In 1755, the year of the Lisbon earthquake, another destructive eruption took place. The years 1852, 1865, 1874, 1879, 1886, and 1892 were marked by eruptions. Among the theories by which the ancients strove to account for the activity of Etna was the legend of Enceladus. According to this legend he was one of the hundred-handed Titans who made war against the gods. Jupiter slew him with a thunderbolt and buried him deep beneath the mountain. According to some legends, Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and the patron of blacksmithing, had a forge in Mt. Etna, where he employed the Cyclops in fashioning thunderbolts for Jove. Tourists are enabled to ascend the mountain by a railway which encircles it like a spiral. The railroad is seventy miles in length.