THE VOLCANIC ERUPTION OF KRAKATAU. 365 



silently sliding over it millions of years ago. Art and science have 

 this in common, that both require genius as a condition of their full 

 development. Science in its highest departments, like art, can not live 

 and grow except by incessant discovery. The faculty which enabled 

 Newton to divine the law of the stars is the same with that by which 

 Shakespeare perceived the psychological laws that govern the characters 

 of Hamlet and Othello. Like the poet, the man of science also must 

 always be able to put himself in thought in the place of Nature, to 

 learn how she acts, and to represent to himself what she might do if 

 one should change the conditions of her action. The art of either is 

 to place the beings of Nature in new circumstances, as if they were 

 active personages, and thus, to as great an extent as possible, to reno- 

 vate or new-create Nature. The hypothesis is a kind of sublime ro- 

 mance, a scientific poem. Kepler, Pascal, and Newton had, as Mr. 

 Tyndall remarks, the temperaments of poets, almost of visionaries. 

 Faraday compared his intuitions of scientific truth to " interior illumi- 

 nations," to a sort of ecstasies that raised him above himself. Once, 

 after long reflections on force and matter, he perceived in a poetic 

 vision the whole world "traversed by lines of forces," the endless 

 vibrations of which produced light and heat throughout immensity. 

 This instinctive vision was the origin of his theory of the identity of 

 force and matter. Science, then, in the face of the unknown, com- 

 ports itself in many respects as poetry does, and demands the same 

 creative instinct. For its advancement is required the power of intui-. 

 tive intelligence collected by many generations ; insight, as Carlyle 

 calls it, to perceive the true or the beautiful before having a full 

 knowledge of it. — Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from 

 the Revue des Deux Mondes, 



THE YOLCANIO EEUPTION OF KEAKATAU. 



CONSIDERING that the volcanic eruption, of which the Straits of 

 Sunda have been for the last eight months the center, is among 

 the most stupendous of our times, and that the attendant phenomena 

 have given rise to many questions of the highest scientific and, we 

 may add, geographical interest, a resum^ of the facts compiled from 

 all the latest available sources may be interesting to our readers. 



The Island of Krakatau (such, and not Krakatoa, is the native name) 

 is situated in latitude 6° 7' south, longitude 105° 26' east, in the fair- 

 way of the Sunda Straits, about equally distant from Java and Su- 

 matra, close on twenty-six miles west-southwest from the village and 

 lighthouse of Anjer, the call-port or signal -station, prior to the present 

 eruption, for all vessels passing through that frequented channel. It 

 was a small, uninhabited island about five miles in length and three in 



