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Updated: May 5, 2025
If one of the number may speak for the rest, we have to acknowledge that commercial prosperity and business cares, the eagerness after pleasure and the exigencies of political strife, diffused doubt and widespread artistic and literary culture, are eating the very life out of thousands in our churches, and lowering their fervour till, like molten iron cooling in the air, what was once all glowing with ruddy heat is crusted over with foul black scoriae ever encroaching on the tiny central warmth.
At the Galapagos Archipelago, pits of a similar character, but of a much smaller size, frequently occur at the bases of small cones of eruption. In the neighbourhood of Green Mountain, fragments of extraneous rock are not unfrequently found embedded in the midst of masses of scoriae.
Nothing but vast beds of glistering lava, now rough like immense piles of scoriae and clinker, now smooth like crystal mirrors, and reflecting the Sun's rays with the same intolerable glare. Not the faintest speck of life.
By this erosion, and by earthquakes, their internal structure has occasionally been laid open to view, in fissures and ravines; and we then behold not only many successive beds and masses of porous lava, sand, and scoriae, but also perpendicular walls, or DIKES, as they are called, of volcanic rock, which have burst through the other materials.
The calcareous matter beneath the lava, and especially that forming the crystalline spicula between the interstices of the scoriae, although heated in an atmosphere probably composed chiefly of steam, could not have been subjected to the effects of a passing stream; and hence it is, perhaps, that they have retained their carbonic acid, under a small amount of pressure.
This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of "garment," "scoriae," "mirror," &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. "Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth," is the fundamental law of criticism.
"In its ordinary state," he says, "the surface of the lava, in the midst of which black scoriae are continually floating, remains several hundred feet below the edges of the water. But sometimes there is suddenly produced an ebullition so violent, that the lava rises almost to the very brim."
We ascended the Piton by grasping these half-decomposed scoriae, which often broke in our hands. We employed nearly half an hour to scale a hill, the perpendicular height of which is scarcely ninety toises. Vesuvius, three times lower than the peak of Teneriffe, is terminated by a cone of ashes almost three times higher, but with a more accessible and easy slope.
Gases and steam escaping from other similar masses may leave them hollow, when they are termed bombs, or may pit their surfaces with irregular bubble-cavities, when they are called scoriae or scoriaceous.
Massive flows have fallen in, exposing caverned depths of jagged outlines. Earthquakes have riven the mountain, splitting its sides and opening deep crevasses, which must be leapt or circumvented. Horrid streams of a-a have to be cautiously skirted, which after rushing remorselessly over the kindlier lava have heaped rugged pinnacles of brown scoriae into impassable walls.
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