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A spiral of steam drifting up from the sulphur-crowned summit of the mountain shows that fires still linger in its bosom, but for many years it has been quiet, and at no time does history show that it has broken forth in fury to wreak the awful destruction that is written down against some of the volcanoes of these islands.
A "spoken book" is always a poor book, just as lectures read are poor however well prepared. Published courses of lectures are my detestation. Cotta is also printing a volume of mine in German, "Physikalische geographische Erinnerungen." Many unpublished things concerning the volcanoes of the Andes, about currents, etc. And all this at the age when one begins to petrify! It is very rash!
ANCIENT VOLCANIC ROCKS. It is in these materials and structures which we have described that volcanoes leave some of their most enduring records. Even the volcanic rocks of the earliest geological ages, uplifted after long burial beneath the sea and exposed to view by deep erosion, are recognized and their history read despite the many changes which they may have undergone.
Houses with gaping chasms in their sides, others mere heaps of black ruins; great trees felled, cabins demolished, and here and there the sidewalk ploughed across from curb to fence. "Lordy," exclaimed the Colonel. "Lordy I how my ears ache since your damned coehorns have stopped. The noise got to be silence with us, seh, and yesterday I reckoned a hundred volcanoes had bust.
The observations which have been made on the grouping of volcanoes in America, prove that the ancient state of things represented in the conjectural map of the Atlantic by M. Bory de St. The peak of Teyde forms a pyramidal mass like Etna, Tungurahua, and Popocatepetl. This physiognomic character is very far from being common to all volcanoes.
When they added up these different figures they found that the surface of this hemisphere measured 4,738,160 square leagues, 3,317,600 of which go for volcanoes, chains of mountains, amphitheatres, islands in a word, all that seems to form the solid portion of the globe and 1,410,400 leagues for the seas, lake, marshes, and all that seems to form the liquid portion, all of which was perfectly indifferent to the worthy Michel.
During that month she had left books alone, for she had found greater joy in reading from the book of life. She had ridden horses, climbed volcanoes, and learned surf swimming. The tropics had entered into her blood, and she was aglow with the warmth and colour and sunshine.
What would we think of a father, who should give a farm to his children, and before giving them possession should plant upon it thousands of deadly shrubs and vines; should stock it with ferocious beasts; and poisonous reptiles; should take pains to put a few swamps in the neighborhood to breed malaria; should so arrange matters, that the ground would occasionally open and swallow a few of his darlings, and besides all this, should establish a few volcanoes in the immediate vicinity, that might at any moment overwhelm his children with rivers of fire?
Here are gargantuan sheds, capable of holding thirty thousand tons of mineral apiece; furnaces, miniature volcanoes, for drying them artificially in winter-time, when the sun's heat is insufficient; all around you a gehenna of mad industrial life, smoke and steam, a throbbing agglomeration of wheels and belts and pistons; there are chains of buckets, filled with phosphates, wandering overhead in endless progression or disappearing sullenly into the bowels of the earth; passionate electric motors; mountains of coal and iron contrivances; railway engines snorting and whistling, or bearing a load of minerals down from the hills to where an army of Arabs will tear them out of the cars to dry, amid clouds of tawny dust.
Recent studies, however, have brought about a change in the views of geologists which is represented by the fact that we shall treat volcanic phenomena in connection with the history of rock water. In endeavouring to understand the phenomena of volcanoes it is very desirable that the student should understand what goes on in a normal eruption.
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