6o 



Kilauea and Manna Loa. 



that the floor with its margin of blocks had been elevated parth' by upheaving forces 

 from beneath, and partlj' bj- overflows from the Great Lake and other active vents until 

 the talus overtopped the precipice at the foot of which it was accumulated. If these 

 gentlemen had been content with either the elevation or the overflow theory singly, we 

 could understand to some extent the process; we have recently seen the former in the 

 strange obelisk of Mont Pelee, and the latter is the usual way in which the floor of 

 Kilauea is raised. But if either Prof. Dana or Mr. Lj'man had seen a lava stream 

 taking a dry stone wall 

 in hand, quietly insinu- 

 ating its flexible black 

 fingers under and be- 

 tween the stones and 

 raising them up and 

 carr3'ing them off, the}- 

 would have seen the im- 

 probabilit}^ of their wall 

 of stone remaining /// situ 

 surrounding an overflow- 

 ing vent of lava. Mr. 

 Coan saw clearly that the 

 rise of the floor of the 

 crater was due mainly at 

 least to the accumula- 

 tion of overflowing lava; 

 it was acrogenous, and 

 not pushed up from be- 

 low. The rise of a cylin- 

 der of lava a mile in diameter some two hundred feet would be remarkable, but with 

 an overflowing bowl of lava more than a thousand feet in diameter in its very midst the 

 phenomenon would be incomprehensible. It is also difficult to see what this ascension 

 has to do with forming the canals. When I surveyed the crater eight or nine years 

 after, most of this wall, which did not appear on the original plan as shown above, had 

 disappeared, but in a like position were scattered stones which I could not believe had 

 ever been elevated to their then position ; they had dropped from the cliffs above — the 

 outer walks — precisely as can be seen today on the trail into the crater huge rocks of 



the same formation which were hurled down in the earthquake of 1868. 



C438] 



LYMAN'S CORRKCTED PLAN. 



