hy Alexander von Humboldt. xxxix 



the hills of Moya, near the village of Pelilco, cast up in the 

 celebrated earthquake of 7th February, 1797, and still in a 

 state of activity ; the Chimborazo, which M. Jules Remy, ac- 

 companied by an Englishman named Princkley, was in the 

 belief they had ascended, on the 3rd of November, 1856, 

 to the very summit, " mais sans s^en douter.^^ Poggendorff, 

 (Vol. X. p. 480), has clearly demonstrated that the boiling 

 point given by Remy for the summit, would not give 6544 

 metres (little different from my own trigonometrical admea- 

 surement of 6530 metres), but fully 7328 metres. As I 

 distrust my own half-barometical measurements, I have 

 vainly implored travellers, these fifty years past, to have a 

 new series of trigonometrical observations made of the 

 summit of Chimborazo. The merit, then, of settling this 

 moot point, it also remains for the members of the Novara 

 Expedition to obtain. 



It would be important to examine the Sangay (16,068 

 feet) — which, like Stromboli, is in constant activity, yet 

 without any traces of lava-streams — on account of the 

 veins of quartz discovered by Weise in the trachytic 

 boulders ejected by the volcano, which is of such rare 

 occurrence in the trachytes of Hungary; and also on 

 account of the close vicinity of beds of granite and gneiss, 

 which are broken through by the Sangay trachyte, form- 

 ing an island, as it were, of not hardly two miles in 

 breadth. Still more deserving of attention is the extinct 

 volcano El Altar de los CoUaues (Capac Urcu) a sketch of 



