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Updated: June 6, 2025
Older Pliocene volcanic Rocks. Italy. Pliocene Volcanoes of the Eifel. Trass. Having in the former part of this work referred the sedimentary strata to a long succession of geological periods, we have now to consider how far the volcanic formations can be classed in a similar chronological order.
Their Christianity was as superficial as that of the peasant of the Eifel in our own day, or of the Finnish converts of whom we are told that they are even now not beyond sacrificing a foal in honour of the Virgin Mary.
The most interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not the castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand all this it has in common with the Rhine but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to say coarseness, of the inhabitants.
In many parts of Alsace and Lorraine the midsummer fires still blaze annually or did so not very many years ago. At Speicher in the Eifel, a district which lies on the middle Rhine, to the west of Coblentz, a bonfire used to be kindled in front of the village on St. John's Day, and all the young people had to jump over it.
In Auvergne, the Eifel, and other countries where trachyte and basalt are both present, the trachytic rocks are for the most part older than the basaltic.
The winding Ahr, coming from the tufa-plateau of the Eifel and watering a pretty valley full of old castles and churches, rolls its waters into the Rhine in this neighborhood, and in summer no trip is so pleasant to the citizens of Bonn and Cologne, and indeed to many tourists if they have time to breathe. But in winter the scenery is worthy of the New World.
The region bordering the Rhine along both its banks above Bonn, and extending thence along the valley of the Moselle and into the Eifel, has been the theatre of active volcanic phenomena down into recent times, but at the present day the volcanoes are dormant or extinct.
Thus we conclude that they belong to an entirely different type, and have been built up in a different manner, from those represented by Etna, Vesuvius, and most of the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, the Eifel, and of other districts considered in these pages.
In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the same season similar customs have prevailed. Thus in the Eifel Mountains, Rhenish Prussia, on the first Sunday in Lent young people used to collect straw and brushwood from house to house. These they carried to an eminence and piled up round a tall, slim beech-tree, to which a piece of wood was fastened at right angles to form a cross.
But we may be pretty sure that this is one of the cases in which magic has dwindled into divination. So in the Eifel Mountains, when the smoke blows towards the corn-fields, this is an omen that the harvest will be abundant.
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