Solder, lawyer and writer, Pliny the Elder’s (23 – 79 AD) research into the natural world formed the basis of scientific authority for centuries to come. He died during the eruption of Mount ...

Pliny the Elder. "On the 24th of August, about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him to observe a cloud..." he wrote in a letter to Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian, about the events ...