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Could they be rivers of lava once vomited from that centre by resistless volcanic agency and afterwards crystallized into glassy rock? This idea of Herschel's, Barbican had no hesitation in qualifying as exceedingly absurd. Rivers running in perfectly straight lines, across plains, and up as well as down mountains!

He had shrunk from realizing the sensations which had been forced upon him there a recoil of his nature as from unappeasable wild-beast greeds, with their attendant envy, suspicion, and hatred seething like lava under the thin crust of a forced affability, of a good-humour assumed to make deception easy. He did not want to think of it; it was horrible.

Then I never expected to be right on the very top of that volcano, throwing stones down in the lava, and sailing chips down the streams of hot stuff, just as I sailed chips on ice water at home-when the streets were flooded by spring rains. Say, there is no more danger on Vesuvius than there is in a toboggan slide, or shooting the chutes at home.

For a time it is kept down by the vast weight of the lava which is over it, but after a time the elastic force of it gets so great that a bubble of it bursts up, and comes out at the top of the mountain in a great, thundering puff, bringing up some portion of the melted lava with it, and throwing it high into the air.

Steam is so evidently concerned in explosive eruptions that many believe that lava is driven upward by the expansive force of the steam with which it is charged, much as a viscid liquid rises and boils over in a test tube or kettle. But in quiet eruptions, and still more in the irruption of intrusive sheets and masses, there is little if any evidence that steam is the driving force.

The tuff contains fragments of lava and pebbles of Apennine limestone, and was deposited under the waters of an extensive lake at a time when volcanic action was rife amidst the Alban Hills. This lacustrine formation rests in turn on deposits of marine origin, containing oysters, patellæ, and other sea-shells, of which the chain of hills on the right bank of the Tiber is chiefly formed.

Nasmyth's well-known hypothesis attributes the radiating streaks to cracks in the lunar globe caused by the action of an upheaving force, and accounts for their whiteness by the outwelling of lava from them which has spread to a greater or less distance on either side.

Parmetella did as she was bid, and after the ogress had sworn by the fire-shovel, by the spinning-wheel, by the reel, by the sideboard, and by the peg, at last she swore by Thunder-and-Lightning; whereupon Parmetella let go her hold, and showed herself to the ogress, who said, "You have caught me this time; but take care, Traitress! for, at the first shower, I'll send you to the Lava."

He had never been on the back of any animal before, and was nevertheless not surprised or daunted at falling off frequently, though an interlude of being dragged along with one foot in the stirrup over lava beds made no little impression upon him.

Afterwards, the missionaries learned that volcanoes were scattered over the islands, some extinct and only showing wide black mouths, others still blazing and throwing up jets of burning lava, which even in the sunshine take on a scarlet hue, and in the night gleam a yellowish white.