one of the Lipari islands. See LIPARA AND LIPARI.—The ancients called it Thermisia, from the hot waters which they found in it. It may be about eight or nine miles in circumference. It bears wheat, and grapes, from which the inhabitants make wine. Pannaria, like the other adjacent islands, appears to be a volcano; its original having been destroyed by continued eruptions. It is now no longer of a conical figure. It contains about 100 inhabitants, reckoning every soul, men, women, and children. It is, like Stromboli, governed by a curate, who depends on the priest of the parish of St Joseph in Lipari; and when any couple in the island determine to marry, they must cross the sea to Lipari to receive the nuptial benediction in the parish of St Joseph, or pay a sum for a licence to empower the curate of Pannaria to perform the ceremony. All the other adjoining islands are subject to the same regulation.

The inhabitants of Pannaria live by fishing, and by taking small quantities of game on this and the little contiguous islands. They bring up and tame those birds known by the game of gulls, which are seen in tempestuous weather flying near the surface of the sea. They are here called coraci. The body of the bird and the tips of its wings are white; but the head, the tail, and the rest of the wings, are gray: they are of the size of Indian hens; their wings are prodigiously large: they have their nests on the steep inaccessible cliffs of the several islands. When the islanders bring these birds up tame, they feed them with fish, which, though of such size that you would think it impossible for their stomachs to receive them, they eagerly stretch their necks and swallow rapaciously. These birds are thus brought up to be as tame as pullets or pigeons; and such an attachment do they often acquire to the places in which they are reared, that some of them have been known to return to these islands after being conveyed to Messina and Messina.

On the summit of a hill in this island, which projects over the sea, the inhabitants pretend to show a castle and an inscription. But their castle is only an elevated peak of the rock, which nature seems to have prepared as a retreat for birds. It consists of puzzolana; and has been actually formed by the action of winds and rains, for a long course of time, into a fantastic figure, which may appear, when carefully viewed from a distance by an undistinguishing eye, the remains of some ancient structure. The good people of the island, not being able to judge of it otherwise than from appearance, are persuaded, that it can be nothing but a castle, which must have been reared for the defence of the island against the Turks and the corsairs of Barbary. These they consider as the most dreadful scourge with which mankind can possibly be afflicted, and fear them much more than the eruptions of the volcano. When they feel their island shaken, they embark with all their wealth, which a single sloop easily contains; and on board they are safe from both the flaking of the earth and the eruptions of the lava, but not from an hostile fleet.

In this island there appear various remains of ancient buildings, but very ruinous and very scanty. In ploughing the fields, many remains of sepulchres, in different modes of construction, are found; some of rough stones, tiles, or bricks; others consisting each of a single stone. Vases of various sorts and sizes are also said to have been found in the same fields, utensils of different kinds, money, chains, and medals of lead. But none of these relics of antiquity have been preserved: the good people who found them were ignorant of their value, and therefore neglected them as trifles. In places along the shore of the island, where the sea appears to have encroached, there are some hewn stones to be seen: they seem to be remains of walls, which must have been very strong and of elegant architecture. In other places farther distant from the shore, there likewise appear fragments of walls sunk in the ground, and apparently overwhelmed with mud, which the winds and rains have brought down from the mountain above. These remains show, that Pannaria, either under the Greeks, or in that period when all the elements were taxed for the gratification of Roman luxury, must have been adorned with superb buildings, as well as the adjacent islands of Lipari, Stromboli, and Bafiluzzo.

PANNELS of a SADDLE, are two cushions or bolsters, filled with cows, deer, or horses hair, and placed under the saddle, on each side, to prevent the bows and bands from galling the horse.