36 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



in the chase after an unknown volcano seems to have in- 

 creased with every step of the journey, as more and more 

 of the dark stone appeared in the buildings by the road- 

 side. At Kiom he found the town almost entirely built 

 of the material, which he felt sure he had now run nearly 

 to earth. Learning that the quarries were still some two 

 leagues distant, he pushed on to them, and great was his 

 delight to find all his suspicions amply confirmed. He 

 recognized the rock as a solidified current of lava which 

 had flowed down from the high granitic ridge for some 

 five English miles into the plain below, and he found the 

 actual cone and crater from which the molten flood had 

 issued. 



We can follow the enthusiastic explorer with warm 

 sympathy as he eagerly and joyously sees at each onward 

 step some fresh evidence of the true volcanic nature of the 

 rocks around him. Though he had never beheld a volcano, 

 he was familiar with their outlines from the available 

 engravings of the time. Ascending a hill beyond the 

 quarries, he recognizes its conical form as that of a typical 

 volcano. 1 As he climbs the rough slopes, he identifies the 

 crumbling debris of black and red pumice, together with 

 the blocks of rugged spongy slags and scoriae, as manifestly 

 the products of a once active volcanic vent. When he 

 reached the truncated summit of the hill, what must have 



is curious that, with the statements of the two travellers long ago in 

 print, Scrope should have published a totally inaccurate version of the 

 journey in the first edition of his Volcanoes of Central France, and should 

 have repeated it in the second edition. 



1 Desmarest affirms that it was not the Puy de la Nugere, the source 

 of the Volvic lava, which Guettard ascended, but the Puy de la Banniere, 

 and that the former hill was unknown to him, Encyclopedic Mdhodique, 

 Geographic, Physique, vol. i. p. 187. 



