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Updated: May 5, 2025
It was not alone from the volcano that they derived their strange opacity and weight. Scoriae, in a state of dust, like powdered pumice-stone, and grayish ashes as small as the finest feculae, were held in suspension in the midst of their thick folds. These ashes are so fine that they have been observed in the air for whole months.
Thence it becomes difficult to judge whether the emission of scoriae may have been more frequent at the time when an earthquake has been felt in the Apennines. On the ridge of the Cordilleras everything assumes a more decided character. An eruption of ashes, which lasts only a few minutes, is often followed by a calm of ten years.
I could not perceive the smallest trace of smoke on the summit of Tunguragua or Cotopaxi. A gust of vapour issuing from the crater of Mount Vesuvius scarcely attracts the attention of the inhabitants of Naples, accustomed to the movements of that little volcano, which throws out scoriae sometimes during two or three years successively.
And their planes of stratification are parallel to those of the overlying and underlying scoriae which form part of the same currents. When geologists first began to examine attentively the structure of the northern and western parts of Europe, they were almost entirely ignorant of the phenomena of existing volcanoes.
"Material objects," said a French philosopher, "are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."
I could perceive no trace of a metallic vein, so thoroughly had it been worked out, but scattered over the hillside with schist, talcose slate, and fragments of quartz, was a great deal of scoriae, showing that metal of some kind had been excavated, and that the smelting had been done on the spot.
Each stream is separated from the one above it by a few inches, or at most by one or two feet in thickness, of loose fragmentary scoriae, apparently derived from the abrasion of the streams in passing over each other. All these streams are very remarkable from their thinness. A second stream was only eight inches thick, including both the upper and lower scoriaceous surfaces.
Beyond the desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn; sharp-cutting walls of narrow cañons; league-wide, frozen puddles of black rock, intolerable and forbidding. Beyond the lava the mouths that spewed it out, ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of red earth, as red as a red heifer. These have some comforting of shrubs and grass.
However, on winding one fuse, I found that the mechanism would not go, choked with scoriae; and I had to resign myself to the task of opening and dusting every one: a wretched labour in which I spent that day, like a workman. But about four I threw them to the devil, having done two hundred odd, and then hummed back in the motor to London.
The eruptions of steam and gaseous matter which burst forth from the crater of Denise broke through laminated Tertiary clays, small pieces of which, some of them scarcely altered, others half converted into scoriae, were cast out in abundance, while other portions must have been in a state of argillaceous mud.
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