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Updated: May 7, 2025
The Puy de Dome, and the mountains in its neighbourhood, likewise appear to be of volcanic origin, and to have been upheaved somewhat in the same manner as Jorullo.
Such is the origin of the volcano of Jorullo, in the State of Michoican, and such is the pretended consequence of a curse pronounced by Capuchin monks upon one of the most beautiful estates in the country; and for generations since, the dread of incurring the displeasure of strolling vagabond monks has rested like a blight upon the common people; and yet this is but one of the thousand ways by which the Mexican priesthood play upon the credulity of the ignorant in a country where convulsions of nature are matters of almost ordinary occurrence.
If this were so, the extinct volcanoes of the British Isles would still be active, as they are close to the sea-margin, and no volcano would now be active which is not near to some large sheet of water. But Jorullo, one of the great active volcanoes of Mexico, lies no less than 120 miles from the ocean, and Cotopaxi, in Ecuador, is nearly equally distant.
No further back than the middle of the eighteenth century the site of Jorullo was a level plain, including several highly-cultivated fields, which formed the farm of Don Pedro di Jorullo. The plain was watered by two small rivers, called Cuitimba and San Pedro, and was bounded by mountains composed of basalt the only indications of former volcanic action.
This phenomenon, analogous to that which I observed in the crater of Jorullo, deserves the more attention, as muriatic acid abounds in the greater part of volcanoes, and as M. Vauquelin has discovered it even in the porphyritic lavas of Sarcouy in Auvergne. I sketched on the spot a view of the interior edge of the crater, as it presented itself in the descent by the eastern break.
It is not uncommon for lava-streams to require more than ten years to cool in the open air; and where they are of great depth, a much longer period. The melted matter poured from Jorullo, in Mexico, in the year 1759, which accumulated in some places to the height of 550 feet, was found to retain a high temperature half a century after the eruption.
The cones of volcanoes have a medium slope from 33 to 40 degrees. The steepest parts of these cones, either of Vesuvius, the Peak of Teneriffe, the volcano of Pichincha, or Jorullo, are from 40 to 42 degrees. A slope of 55 degrees is quite inaccessible. Isolated volcanoes, in the most distant regions, are very analogous in their structure.
Reference may properly be made here to Monte Nuovo and Jorullo, not that they appertain to the present subject, but that they form examples of the action of similar forces, in the one instance exerted on a lake bottom, in the other on dry land, each yielding permanent volcanic elevations in every respect analogous to those which rise as islands from the bottom of the sea.
I think there is as little probability that mountains of granite, gneiss, or primitive calcareous stone have existed where we now see the tops of the Peak, of Vesuvius, and of Etna, as in the plains where almost in our own time has been formed the volcano of Jorullo, which is more than a third of the height of Vesuvius.
On the surface of the swollen mound there were formed thousands of small cones, from six to ten feet in height, and sending forth steam to heights varying from twenty to thirty feet. Out of a chasm in the midst of these cones, or ovens, as the natives call them, there rose six large masses, the highest of which is sixteen hundred feet in height, and constitutes the volcano of Jorullo.
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