La Topografia fisica della Campania (1798) di Scipione Breislak: la storia della Terra e la teoria dei vulcani DOI: 10.4458/0740-03

Abstract

Scipione Breislak (1750-1826) was a Roman geologist and naturalist who studied the volcanic areas of central and southern Italy in the 1780s and 1790s. The Topografia fisica della Campania (1798) – written in Breislak’s stay in Naples where he worked as a teacher of Physics in the Military Academy of Nunziatella and was the Director of the factory alum of the Solfatara of Pozzuoli – shows the results of his investigations on the phenomena of the Vesuvius and the Phlegraean volcanic area. In this report Breislak explains his thoughts on the so called Grotta del Cane. These thoughts show us for the first time the directional concept of the Earth directional and his theory on volcanoes. By rejecting the hypothesis of iron sulphides, adopted few years before in the Essais mineralogiques sur la Solfatare de Pouzzole (1792), Breislak argues that the combustion of the petroleum is the cause of eruptions of Vesuvius. This assumption rules out the Huttonian idea of a correlation between the activities of volcanoes and the heat of the Earth.