10 MAY 1902, Page 3

There have been during the week accounts of terrible volcanic

disturbances in the West Indies, and on Friday the Times published a telegram to the effect that St. Pierre—the capital of the French island of Martinique and a. thriving town of twenty thousand people—and its inhabitants, with all the shipping, had been "totally destroyed by a volcano." If the news is literally true the disaster is almost without parallel in modern times. We have to go back to Pompeii and Hercu- laneum for the utter blotting out of a whole city.