Phillips.— 0/i the Volcanoes of the Pacific. 203 



18 ft. deep. I mention this now as I have often heard of 

 other lakes in the Pacific believed by the natives to be 

 similarly fathomless. 



It will be noticed that the Sandwich Island volcanoes are 

 quite outside of my three lines of phenomena. But Kilauea 

 may only be a huge safety-valve in this particular portion of 

 the earth's crust, showing a great and permanent fault near 

 it. That it has long been so the immense height of the vol- 

 canic lava, cinder, and ash heap forming the mountain (nearly 

 32,000 ft.), with a base of a hundred miles in diameter, 

 proves ; so that this safety-valve must have retained this one 

 escape for many thousands of years ; or it may be that the 

 whole bed of the ocean for more than a thousand miles round 

 the group has been slowly subsiding, and that the volcanoes 

 on the Sandwich Group, and Cotopaxi and others in Central 

 America, are safety-valves. Certainly the islands in the 

 Pacific on and immediately to the north of the equator, as I 

 have pointed out, have been also slowly subsiding. The result 

 of this subsidence has been upheaval along the 20th parallel 

 of south latitude, as the evidences show. 



I might also point out that the trend of the Sandwich 

 Group, south-east to north-west, somewhat contradicts my 

 theory of islands north of the equator trending south-west to 

 north-east, like the Japan, Kurile, and Aleutian Islands. 



I am particular in giving members all the information I 

 can upon this subject, principally in the southern Pacific 

 (without making detailed reference to the New Zealand 

 craters, which more able observers have described), so that 

 the heights and distances of the various active and extinct 

 volcanoes from each other may be seen almost at a glance by 

 any persons studying the map of the ocean. It would be 

 necessary to examine the records taken by the " Challenger" 

 and other expeditions as to the depths of the Pacific Ocean 

 between the different groups of islands. It is a mistake to 

 suppose that there are vast stretches of ocean-bed between 

 these groups, because that is not generally the case by any 

 means. For the fixity of all the continents and oceans ; the 

 limitation of the supposed great glacial epochs and ice regions 

 almost to their present position ; the fixity of the poles and 

 the equator from the original setting of the planet after cool- 

 ing to the positions we find them now, would follow as corol- 

 laries to my present doubt of the former existence of a great 

 southern continent in the Pacific. But why the shores of the 

 Pacific Ocean and its central southern bed should be subject 

 to so much volcanic action is remarkable. We find few 

 such phenomena around the shores of the Atlantic or Indian 

 Oceans. The fact that active volcanoes are confined within 

 a short distance of sea-coasts might show a weakness in the 



