OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS. 397 



vertically or tilted in every direction, while a low sullen crash is heard from below. While 

 you gaze in mute amazement, and feel the solid masses of rock, often thirty, fifty, or seventy 

 feet thick, moving under your feet, the struggling lava oozes out through ten thousand 

 orifices and fissures over a field of some four or five square miles. More than once have I 

 been on such a field, and heard, and seen, and felt more than is here or can be described. 

 And yet the action of the lava is so slow, in the conditions described, that there is no fear, 

 and little danger to one well acquainted with such phenomena. 



"During the night of the 29th of January, the molten stream poured continuously over 

 a precipice of fifty feet, into a deep, dry basin half filled with flood-wood. The angle down 

 which this fire cataract flowed, was about seventy-five degrees : the lava was divided into 

 two, three, and sometimes four channels from one to four yards wide, and two or three feet 

 deep. The flow was continuous down the face of this precipice from two p. m. until ten 

 the next morning, when we left. During the night the immense basin under the fall was 

 filled, the precipice converted into an inclined plane of about four degrees, and the burning 

 stream was urging its way along the rocky channel below. But the scene on the night of 

 the 12th of February was, in some respects, more gorgeous still, as it combined the element 

 of water with that of fire. A stream of lava from twenty to forty yards wide had followed 

 the rocky and precipitous bed of a river, until it was two miles in advance of the main lava- 

 flow, which was nearly two miles broad. Beating our way through the thicket we came 

 upon the terminus of this narrow stream of lava, near sunset. It was intensely active, and 

 about to pour over a precipice of thirty-nine feet (by measurement), into a basin of deep 

 water, large enough to float a ship. Before dark the lava began to fall into the water, first 

 in great broken masses, like clots of blood ; but in a short time in continuous, incandescent 

 streams, which increased from hour to hour in volume, in brilliancy, and in rate of motion. 

 The water boiled and raged with fearful vehemence, raising its domes and cones of ebulli- 

 tion ten feet high, and reflecting the red masses of fusion like a sea of fire mingled with 

 blood. 



" We encamped on the bank of the river, about fifty feet below the fiery cataract, and 

 exactly opposite the basin of water into which the lava was flowing, twenty feet only from 

 its rim. The face of this precipice was an angle of about eighty degrees, and the lava 

 flowed down it briskly and continuously, in streams from one to four feet deep, during the 

 night. Before morning this whole body of water, some twenty feet deep, was converted 

 into steam, and the precipice became a gently inclined plane. 



" I have seen continuous lava-streams flow rapidly down the sides of the mountain from 

 ten to probably fifty feet deep. Lava flows at any depth, or any angle, and at any rate 

 of progress from twenty feet an hour to forty miles." 



To make the fact that the fissure did not extend to the base of the mountain more cleai, 

 Mr. Coan again writes under date of October 22d, 1S56 ; he had then visited the flow seven 

 times. 



" A fracture or fractures occurred near the summit of the mountain, which extended in an 

 irregular line from the terminal point, say five miles down the north-east slope of the 

 mountain. From this serrated and yawning fissure, for two to thirty yards wide, the 

 molten flood rushed out and spread laterally for four or five miles, filling the ravines, flowing 

 over the plains, and covering all those high regions, from ten to one or two hundred feet 

 deep. Along this extended fissure, elongated cones were formed at the points of the 



MEMOIRS BOST. SOC. NAT. HIST. Vol. I. Pt. 3. 101 



