178 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
which the fluid lava runs upon its seaward journey from the crater; and 
from the crater itself, two thousand feet above sea level, rises a similar 
fountain of thin steam that quickly merges with the dense clouds above. 
When one looks upon the enormous mass of this new mountain, it seems 
impossible that five years could be sufficient for its formation, yet this is 
actually the case. The first crater appeared in August, 1905, upon the 
floor of a beautiful green valley. As cinders and lava were sent out, they 
gradually built up a larger dome and spread out to form the first strata of 
the great voleanic field. The flow followed the valley to the ocean, but as 
wave after wave of fluid lava or steam-charged ash swept downward, more 
and more territory was devastated, while the lava, already cooled to form 
ridges and hillocks, diverted the later lava rivers into irregular and wider- 
spreading channels. Reaching the ocean, the molten rock poured into 
the depths of the sea over the coral reef, building ever outward, at the same 
time that it followed the reef and shore so as to spread over a section of the 
island represented by a five-mile are of shore. Naturally the seaward wall 
of the whole lava field is highest near its midline where it measures eighty 
or ninety feet. This wall displays a regular series of strata of prismatic 
blocks or tables, formed by the cooling of successive sheets of flowing lava. 
These strata sometimes lie between masses of cinders, showing how the 
eruptive output varied in character during succeeding weeks and months. 
Toward either side, the whole field gradually thins out, and at its western 
edge ends in a series of rough rocky billows, seared and broken by their 
contraction in cooling. Yet their materials reached this point as red-hot 
fluid lava, having journeyed a route that must have been nearly fifteen 
miles in length. 
As the molten lava first swept down the valley and along the strand, we 
can see that its destructive affects were rapid and complete. It was only 
where there were walls of coral limestone, like those of the churches and 
traders’ warehouses that anything could withstand the flood of rock; the 
wooden huts of the seaside villages were entirely consumed. Yet so quickly 
did the surface of the plastic mass become cool, that the cocoanut and other 
trees, felled by the burning through of their bases, were rarely consumed. 
Turning to the voleano Kilauea of the Hawaiian Islands, we find it in 
many respects quite different from Savaii of the Samoan group. It is an 
accessory outlet upon the side of the giant voleanic mountain of Mauna Loa, 
whose main crater at the summit, more than thirteen thousand feet above 
the sea, is active only at very long intervals. There is a journey of two 
hundred miles from Honolulu to the island of Hawaii on which Mauna Loa 
occurs; viewed from the ocean on approach, the even slopes of the mountain 
rise slowly and grandly to the high summit, bearing numerous secondary 
or “parasitic”? cones which have been formed by sporadic local eruptions. 
