i8o 



Kilauea and Manna Loa. 



electric lamp in the full sunlight, a phenomenon I had never observed before; the 

 brightest lavas look dull red by daylight. 



It is hard to believe that the great cone dropped like a plummet into the lava 

 sea below; it is almost as hard to think of its being ground up in this mill, and the 

 only other way out of the difficulty, or the pit, is to melt the whole down as in a vast 

 electric furnace. The tempter Radium stands by with suggestions for many a theory, 

 but when our greatest chemists and physicists know so little of the part this powerful 





Fig. 109. NEW PORTION OF VOLCANO HOUSE. 



substance plays in terrestrial dynamics, we may well resist the temptation, although 

 we know that radium abounds more in the Earth's crust than was at first sup- 

 posed, and it has already been found in many lavas, and in the mineral springs of 

 volcanic regions. 



Another thought came to me as I looked upon that great pit. There are at 

 times many lakes of molten lava scattered over the bed of the main crater at Kilauea, 

 but although while active, they spout lava fountains and show the ebullition of Hale- 

 maumau, when they go out of commission they leave no pit like this. Not one of 

 them has done so. There is only a shallow depression with a floor as solid as any 

 other part of Kilauea's bottom. We walk over these and, unless their histor}' is known 



to us, might class them with the other subsidence phenomena which have at times 



[55S] 



