Penny Blood: Serial Sensation and Working-Class Entertainment — page 107: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

4 gO FLUID SUBSTRATUM. (cH. viit. by cooling.” The hypothesis has also been favourably men- tioned by Prof. Joseph LeConte*. Under these circumstances it appears worth while to follow it out somewhat further, and to examine its validity. There can be no question regarding the fact, that enormous quantities of steam are emitted from volcanos when in erup- tion; and some amount almost continually from many. To be assured of this, it 1s sufficient to look at the frontispiece of Scrope’s “ Volcanos,” or at the view, copied from a photograph, of Vesuvius on the 26th April, 1872, in Palmieri’s “ Vesuvius,” translated by Mr Mallet*. That intrepid observer relates, on that day “two large craters opened at the summit, discharging with a dreadful noise, audible at a great distance, an Immense cloud of smoke and ashes, with bombs and flakes, rising to the height of 1300 metres above the brim of lava.’ The Author remembers that in the narrative of a correspondent of a news- paper at the time, the sound, as heard at Naples, was compared to four lions roaring in the four corners of the room in which he sat. These and similar descriptions give a notion of the enormous quantities of steam, and of the force with which it is emitted on these occasions. The question is, not regarding the fact that water is present in the volcanic emanations, but how it comes to be there. . This of course opens up the whole subject. The circum- stance that many of the best-known volcanos are near the sea, that many actually form islands in the wide ocean, and that great trains of volcanos skirt the shores notably of the Pacific, has led to the opinion that the waters of the sea by some means find access to what have been called the volcanic foci, and are there heated, and find exit through their vents. This explanation has been thought to receive support from the “sea salts,” which are deposited by the emanations’. _ There are but two ways in which the waters of the sea 1 American Journal of Science and Arts, Vol. xvi. p. 107, 3rd Ser. 1878. 3 Asher and Co., London, 1873. See Plate rv. a., and p. 91. 8 «‘ Even chloride of iron, which was so abundant in the lavas, was scarcely perceptible in the smoke, which almost exclusively deposited sea-salt on the surrounding rocks; I say sea-salt advisedly, and not chloride of sodium, to show that I include all that sea-salt contains.” Palmieri, Op. cit. p. 121. COMICOOOLKS @ (CO) >