THE ERUPTION OF BANDAI-SAN. 123 



that the whole mountain was literally made up of water, and inunda- 

 tion must certainly have resulted from the creation of such immense 

 number of water jets in a short space of time. Mr. Odium made 

 numerous measurements of the pits; they vary from a few feet in 

 diameter to over thirty feet, and from 2 to 10 feet in depth. 



Lieut. Y. Nakashiina, of the Army Department, who surveyed 

 the volcano after the eruption, and who, from the nature of his work, 

 acquired an intimate knowledge of the whole area is in entire accord 

 with our opinion as to the origin of the pits. 



Notwithstanding these evidences, however, the conclusions ar- 

 rived at by us and other workers have been freely criticized, and 

 doubts have been thrown upon them. Prof. J. Milne of the Imperial 

 University, dissenting from our views and those of Mr. Odium, be- 

 lieves that the cause producing the holes was seismic in character — 

 to wit, the severe earthquake that accompanied the eruption. He 

 quotes Robert Mallet in support of the hypothesis that they were pro- 

 duced by the spouting action of water from beneath, resulting from 

 seismic compression of the substance of the ground. Similar pits, he 

 says, were made in the great Calabrian earthquake of 1783, and they were 

 specially investigated by a committee sent from the Royal Academy 

 of Naples. These gentlemen also dug into holes, Prof. Milne con- 

 tinued to say, but we do not hear of their having found any boulders. 

 We (the authors of the paper) think that the Neapolitan scientists did 

 not strike into boulders, simply because the pits in the Calabrian plain 

 were not formed by falling stones, which was the case on the slopes 

 of Bandai. It was also argued that like phenomena were observed in 

 the Charleston earthquake of 1886, when sand and muddy water were 

 ejected, making more or less conical holes. But, as far as we under- 

 stand the matter, the formation of holes during destructive earth- 

 quakes by the spouting of water or sand is limited to plains and 



