146 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1890. 



so beautiful and pleasant not a vestige remains — not a blade of grass 

 where lately the mountain was clothed with springy turf, not a 

 green leaf, not a sign of life, nothing but desolation, with a horrid 

 smell arising from stagnant sulphur pools. Great trees, with their 

 trunks twisted and split, lie uprooted and hurled far from the spot 

 where they have stood perhaps for centuries, while of the villages 

 on the mountain not a trace remains — they and their inhabitants 

 lie buried deep beneath this hideous sea of mud. " 



If such was the scene when 30 square miles of land were whelmed 

 beneath a stream of volcanic mud 150 ft. thick, flowing from a 

 single crater, try to imagine what it must have been when with 

 scores of lava vents in full operation, the same calamity occurred over 

 a space 700 times as large, not once or twice only, but at intervals 

 extending over many years, till the wide territory subjected to it was 

 buried 40 times as deep as the fair fields of Bandai. 



Even when the land began in a measure to recover from the effects 

 of these outbursts in the intermissions of their fury, and plant and 

 animal life was again developed on its surface, again and yet again 

 the deadly torrent burst forth, overwhelming in sudden death the 

 young beginnings of life that had just struggled into existence. 



In this way were piled up on the main-land new hills of lava on the 

 site of the swamps that filled the depressions worn by the weather 

 in the surface of the flow that last preceded them. 



But even when these were cooled and solidified into rock, volcanic 

 fires still broke forth at intervals. For we find at several places in 

 the island, notably Sion, Sewri, and Bhandarwara, as well as at the 

 hill in which are excavated the Kanheri Caves in Salsette, and even 

 at the bottom of the harbour in the tideway outside the Prince's 

 Dock, masses of volcanic ash embedding fragments of the older 

 volcanic rock torn off in the later eruptions, which are seen in places 

 to have broken through the strata of volcanic rock and fresh water 

 beds alike. 



Then came the subsidence of a whole tract of country that plunged 

 the western extremities of the continent beneath the waves, and 

 cast her hills into the sea to become a cluster of island rocks. 



Now turn another page of the record at our feet. You remember 

 we saw the soil of the Flats, which form the centre of our island, to 



