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Carbonic Acid and Sulphureous Acid Springs— Cold Springs — 

 Hot Springs — Mud Volcanoes — Volcanoes. By Baron ALEX- 

 ANDER VON Humboldt.* 



Having now taken a general survey of the activity, that 

 is, of the internal life of the globe, in its heat, in its electro- 

 magnetic tension, in its luminous emanations at the poles, in 

 its irregularly-recurring phenomenon of motion, we come to 

 chemical changes in the crust of the earth, and in the compo- 

 sition of the atmosphere, which are, in like manner, the conse- 

 quence of planetary vital activity. From the ground we see 

 effusions of watery vapour and of gaseous carbonic acid, mostly 

 free from all admixture of azote ; of carburetted hydrogen gas, 

 in the Chinese province of Sse-tschuan, for thousands of years, 

 and in the state of New York, where, in the village of Fre- 

 donia, it has lately been employed for economical purposes in 

 heating and lighting ; t of sulphuretted hydrogen gas, of sul- 



* This extract from Cosmos (English edition by Bailliere) at present 

 in course of publication, is slightly altered and enlarged. 



t CarUiretted Hydrogen Spring at Fredonia. — Sailed in a steam-boat 

 to Fredonia, a town of 1200 inhabitants, with neat white houses, and 

 six churches. The streets are lighted up with natural gas, which bubbles 

 out of the ground, and is received into a gasometer, which I visited. 

 This gas consists of carburetted hydrogen, and issues from a black bitumi- 

 nous slate, one of the beds of the Hamilton group of the New York 

 geologists, or part of the Devonian formation of Europe. The lighthouse- 

 keeper at Fredonia told me, that, near the shore, at a considerable dis- 

 tance from the gasometer, he bored a hole through this black slate, and 

 the gas soon collected in sufficient quantity to explode, when ignited. — 

 Travels in North America. By Charles Lyell. Vol. ii., p. 89. 



Burning Spring of Niagara.— At the Falls of Niagara, where vve next 

 spent a week, residing in a hotel on the Canada side, I resumed my 

 geological explorations of last summer. Every part of the scenery, 

 from Grand Island above the Falls, to the ferry at Queenstown, seven 

 miles below, deserves to be studied at leisure. 



We visited the " burning spring" at the edge of the river above the 

 rapids, where carburetted hydrogen, or, in the modern chemical phrase- 

 ology, a light hydro-carbon, similar to that before mentioned at Fredo- 

 nia, rises from beneath the water out of the limestone rock. The 

 bituminous matter supplying this gas is probably of animal origin, as 

 this limestone is full of marine moUusca, Crustacea, and corals, without 



