174 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
tied the husks of cocoanuts to their naked feet for protection in walking 
over the broken lava, and after a final pause for rest, we left the shade and 
tempered heat of the tropical forest for the open glare of the voleano’s 
slope. Viewed from afar, this slope seems even and smooth, but in reality 
it is like a tempestuous ocean suddenly arrested in its movements and 
turned into stone. Here and there wide sheets of lava with corrugated 
rippling surfaces formed still rivers between massive banks of cinders 
through which their molten substance had earlier ploughed its way; larger 
and smaller tables of crust, like broken floes of the Arctic Ocean, were 
tilted up and piled in strange heaps. And so vitreous was the material 
of this sea of black broken rock that the light was reflected from millions 
of crystal surfaces and facets as from so many fragments of ice or glass. 
Progress over this field was necessarily slow, but by following the general 
trend of the less broken lava streams, we gradually worked upward and 
toward the main axis of the whole lava mass, indicated by vents which 
gave egress to steam and gases discharged by fluid lava running through 
tunnels beneath the surface. 
The great crater we found a perfectly typical cone of cinders and lava, 
with a height from base to summit of four hundred feet as measured by 
the aneroid barometer. On three sides it is composed mainly of ashes and 
pumice, but toward the sea its surface displays smoother areas of rock 
where the lava formerly welled over the edge before the tunnels were formed 
by which the discharge now takes place. Large bombs, rounded masses 
of lava hurled from the crater during some explosive eruption, occur on 
the slopes, sometimes covered as by a sheet of tar with a later-extruded 
layer of lava. 
It was in the course of my fourth journey among the islands of the 
Pacific that I made the ascent of this remarkably active voleano formed 
about five years ago on the island of Savaii, the largest member of the 
Samoan group. It happened that my investigations of the distribution 
of the land snails of Polynesia demanded for comparative data a thorough 
exploration of volcanic islands of great age, islands that for many centuries 
have been sculptured by the elements till they present alternating ridges 
and valleys radiating from their high central peaks. Tahiti is perhaps the 
most beautiful example of such an island. In many cases the several 
islands in the Pacifie groups are of different geological ages, and conse- 
quently display different degrees of weathering. They thus form a series 
of stages to show how ancient rugged islands like Tahiti and Moorea may 
have been derived from the newly formed volcanic mountains like those 
of the Hawaiian and other groups which possess relatively even sides with 
lava fields unfurrowed by erosion. 
