3 6S POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gases, finally rush down the mountain slopes in whatever directions 

 they are guided by vale and ridge and wind. They were guided into 

 the cliff-hollow of St. Pierre at Martinique and Walliabou at St. 

 Vincent, both to leeward of the craters. In St. Vincent there was also 

 an outrush symmetrical to the great crater in all directions, windward 

 as well as leeward; hence the destruction of the windward estates. 

 That there was tornado action is proved by the frightful demolition 

 of masonry and the bending of trees; in St. Pierre this is away from 

 the mountain and curving from south-southwest to southwest as we 

 go southward from the volcano, these directions being shown by the 

 downbent trees. 



A common question is 'How were the people killed? Was it some 

 strange gas? Were many killed by lightning?' There is no need 

 for calling in any unusual gas; no doubt there were several gases 

 present and the combustion of tropical vegetation made others that were 

 highly explosive if mixed with air. This may account for some flame 

 explosions reported as coming in from the sea-front at St. Vincent. 

 The people of St. Pierre were killed by steam, hot dust, falling stones, 

 falling buildings, drowning, burial alive and burning. The heat of a 

 burning city fanned into a 'whirlwind of fire,' killed all who were left 

 over from the other sources of death. The little city was as an ant- 

 hill to a forest fire, in the presence of the terrible earth forces at work. 



In conclusion let me say a word about the place of these eruptions 

 in the geological history of the islands. They are not at all different 

 from what the old cliffs, carved by the sea along the shores, show to 

 have been the source of the heaping up of all the rocks that make the 

 foundation stones the hills of these islands are carved upon. For 

 these old sections are what geologists call agglomerates — masses of 

 volcanic fragments, large and small, bedded in gravel and mud. Just 

 such agglomerates are made anew by the great banks of dirt the volcano 

 has vomited into the Walliabou at St. Vincent or Pelee into the gulch 

 of the Factory Guerin. There are also old lavas interbedded with the 

 agglomerates, showing that frequently the eruptions have been con- 

 cluded in the past by the flowing out of molten incandescent rock. 

 Perhaps this may come now, in the near future; even as I write there 

 are cable despatches describing glowing lavas at Mont Pelee. The 

 bared slopes of the Soufriere, devoid of vegetation, reveal a topography 

 and geological structure so exactly like many things in our own Rocky 

 Mountains that it is difficult to believe that one is in the tropics. There, 

 too, in the tuff beds of the Yellowstone Park, is a fossilized tropical 

 verdure which gives evidence that when those volcanoes of Wyoming 

 were active, their slopes were covered by the vegetation of a warm 

 climate near the level of the sea. 



