will be readily received; and I should not myself have advanced it if I could in any other way account for the phenomena. Fortunately, within historical times, there have been volcanic outbursts, not of such magnitude, certainly, as was required to excavate the basin of the lake of Masaya, but still of sufficient extent to show that such an origin is not beyond the limits of possibility.

Thus in the same line of volcanic energy, not far from the boundary line of the states of Nicaragua and San Salvador, there was an eruption of the volcano of Cosaguina, on the 20th of January, 1835, when dense volumes of dust and ashes, and fragments of rocks, were hurled up in the air and deposited over the country around. The vast quantity of material thrown out by this explosion may be gathered from the fact that one hundred and twenty miles away, near the volcano of San Miguel, the dust was so thick that it was quite dark from four o'clock in the evening until nearly noon of the next day; and even at that distance there was deposited a layer of fine ashes four inches deep. The noise of the explosion was heard at the city of Guatemala, four hundred miles to the westward, and at Jamaica, eight hundred miles to the north-east.

In St. Vincent, in the West Indies, there was a great eruption on April 27th, 1812, which continued for three days, and was heard six hundred and thirty miles away on the llanos of Caraccas. This great eruption has been so graphically narrated by Canon Kingsley that I shall once more quote from his eloquent pages. "That single explosion relieved an interior pressure upon the crust of the earth which had agitated sea and land from the

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Azores to the West Indian islands, the coasts of Venezuela, the Cordillera of New Granada, and the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio. For nearly two years the earthquakes had continued, when they culminated in one great tragedy, which should be read at length in the pages of Humboldt. On March 26th, 1812, when the people of Caraccas were assembled in the churches, beneath a still and blazing sky, one minute of earthquake sufficed to bury, amid the ruins of churches and houses, nearly ten thousand souls. The same earthquake wrought terrible destruction along the whole line of the northern Cordilleras, and was felt even at Santa Fé de Bogota and Honda, one hundred and eighty leagues from Caraccas. But the end was not yet. While the wretched survivors of Caraccas were dying of fever and starvation, and wandering inland to escape from ever-renewed earthquake shocks, among villages and farms which, ruined like their own city, could give them no shelter, the almost forgotten volcano of St. Vincent was muttering in suppressed wrath. It had thrown out no lava since 1718, if, at least, the eruption spoken of by Moreau de Jonnés took place in the Souffrière. According to him, with a terrific earthquake, clouds of ashes were driven into the air, with violent detonations from a mountain situated at the eastern end of the island. When the eruption had ceased, it was found that the whole mountain had disappeared. Now there is no eastern end to St. Vincent nor any mountain on the east coast, and the Souffrière is at the northern end. It is impossible, meanwhile, that the wreck of such a mountain should not have left traces visible and notorious to this day. May not the truth be, that the Souffrière had once

a lofty cone, which was blasted away in 1718, leaving the present crater-ring of cliffs and peaks; and that thus may be explained the discrepancies in the accounts of its height, which Mr. Scrope gives as 4,940 feet, and Humboldt and Dr. Davy at 3,000, a measurement which seems to me to be more probably correct? The mountain is said to have been slightly active in 1785. In 1812, its old crater had been for some years (and is now) a deep blue lake, with walls of rock around, 800 feet in height, reminding one traveller (Dr. Davy) of the lake of Albano. But for twelve months it had given warning, by frequent earthquake shocks, that it had its part to play in the great subterranean battle between rock and steam; and on the 27th April, 1812, the battle began.

"A negro boy-he is said to be still alive in St. Vincent-was herding cattle on the mountain-side. A stone fell near him, and then another. He fancied that other boys were pelting him from the cliffs above, and began throwing stones in return. But the stones fell thicker, and among them one and then another too large to have been thrown by human hand. And the poor fellow woke up to the fact that not a boy but the mountain was throwing stones at him; and that the column of black cloud which was rising from the crater above was not harmless vapours, but dust, and ash, and stone. He turned and ran for his life, leaving the cattle to their fate, while the steam mitrailleuse of the Titans-to which all man's engines of destruction are but pop-guns -roared on for three days and nights, covering the greater part of the island in ashes, burying crops, breaking branches off the trees, and spreading ruin from which

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several estates never recovered; and so the 30th of April dawned in darkness which might be felt.

"Meanwhile, on the same day, to change the scene of the campaign two hundred and ten leagues, 'a distance,' as Humboldt says, 'equal to that between Vesuvius and Paris,' the inhabitants, not only of Caraccas, but of Calabozo, situate in the midst of the Llanos, over a space of four thousand square leagues, were terrified by a subterranean noise, which resembled frequent discharges of the loudest cannon. It was accompanied by no shock, and, what is very remarkable, was as loud on the coast as at eighty leagues inland; and at Caraccas, as well as at Calabozo, preparations were made to put the place in defence against an enemy who seemed to be advancing with heavy artillery.' They might as well have copied the St. Vincent herd boy, and thrown their stones, too, at the Titans; for the noise was, there can be no doubt, nothing else than the final explosion in St. Vincent far away. The same explosion was heard in Venezuela, the same at Martinique and Guadaloupe; but there, too, there were no earthquake shocks. The volcanoes of the two French islands lay quiet, and left their English brother to do the work. On the same day, a stream of lava rushed down from the mountain, reached the sea in four hours, and then all was over. The earthquakes which had shaken for two years a sheet of the earth's surface larger than half Europe were stilled by the eruption of this single vent.

"The strangest fact about this eruption was, that the mountain did not make use of its oid crater. The original vent must have become so jammed and consolidated, in the few years between 1785 and 1812, that it could

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not be reopened, even by a steam-force the vastness of which may be guessed at from the vastness of the area which it had shaken for two years. So when the eruption was over it was found that the old crater-lake, incredible as it may seem, remained undisturbed, as far as has been ascertained. But close to it, and separated only by a knife-edge of rock some 700 feet in height, and so narrow that, as I was assured by one who had seen it, it is dangerous to crawl along it; a second crater, nearly as large as the first, had been blasted out, the bottom of which, in like manner, is now filled with water.

"The day after the explosion, 'Black Sunday,' gave a proof, but no measure, of the enormous force which had been exerted. Eighty miles to windward lies Barbadoes. All Saturday a heavy cannonading had been heard to the eastward. The English and French fleets were surely engaged. The soldiers were called out, the batteries manned, but the cannonade died away, and all went to bed in wonder. On the 1st of May the clocks struck six; but the sun did not, as usual in the tropics, answer to the call. The darkness was still intense, and grew more intense as the morning wore on. A slow and silent rain of impalpable dust was falling over the whole island.

"The trade wind had fallen dead; the everlasting roar of the surf was gone; and the only noise was the crashing of the branches snapped by the weight of the clammy dust. About one o'clock the veil began to lift, a lurid sunlight stared in from the horizon, but all was black over head. Gradually the dust-cloud drifted away; the island saw the sun once more, and saw itself inches deep in black, and in this case fertilizing, dust.