TRUE VOLCANOES. 311 



turned by them near the copper mines of Inguaran, in the 

 small town of Patzcuaro, in Santiago de Ario, and many 



plain of Jorullo, and has the merit of having first ascended the 

 summit of the volcano. Some years afterwards he attached himself 

 to the expedition made on the 10th March, 1789, by the Intendente 

 Corregidor, Don Juan Antonio de Riano. To the same expedition 

 belonged a well-informed German, Franz Fischer, who had entered the 

 Spanish service as a Mining Commissary. By means of the latter the 

 name of the Jorullo first became known in Germany, as he mentioned 

 \i in a letter in the Schriften der Gesellschaft der JBergbaukunde, Bd. ii., 

 s. 441. But the eruption of the new volcano had already been re- 

 ferred to in Italy, in Clavigero's Storia antica del Messico (Cesena, 

 1780, t. i, p. 42), and hi the poetical work, Rusticatio Mexicana of 

 Father Raphael Landivar (ed. altera, Bologna, 1782, p. 17). In his 

 valuable work, Clavigero erroneously places the production of the 

 volcano, which he writes Juruyo, in the year 1760, and enlarges the 

 description of the eruption by accounts of the shower of ashes, ex- 

 tending as far as Queretaro, which had been communicated to him 

 in 1766 by Don Juan Manuel de Bustamente, Governor of the Pro- 

 vince of Valladolid de Michuacan, as an eye-witness of the pheno- 

 menon. The poet Landivar, an enthusiastic adherent, like Ovid, of 

 our theory of upheaval, makes the Colossus rise, in euphonious hexa- 

 meters, to the full height of 3 milliaria, and finds the thermal springs 

 (after the fashion of the ancients) cold by day and warm at night. 

 But I saw the thermometer rise to 126^ in the water of the Rio 

 de Cuitimba about noon. 



In 1789, and consequently in the same year that the report of the 

 Governor Riano and the Mining Commissary Franz Fischer, appeared in 

 the Gazeta de Mexico, in the fifth part of his large and useful Diccionario 

 geogrdfico-historico de las Indias Occidentals 6 America, in the article 

 Xurullo, pp. 374 375) Antonio de Alcedo gave the interesting infor- 

 mation that, when the earthquakes commenced (29th June, 1759) in 

 the Playas, the western volcano of Colima, which was in eruption, 

 suddenly became quiet, although it is at a distance of " 70 leguas" (as 

 Alcedo says: according to my map only 112 geog. miles !) from the 

 Playas. " It is thought," he adds, " that the materials in the 

 bowels of the earth have met with obstacles to their following their 

 old course ; and as they have found suitable cavities (to the east," 

 they have broken out at Jorullo para reventar en Xurullo). 

 Accurate topographical statements regarding the neighbourhood of 

 the volcano occur also in Juan Jose" Martinez de Lejarza's geogra- 

 phical sketch of the ancient Taraskian country : A ndlisis estadistico 

 de la provincia de Michuacan en 1822 (Mexico, 1824), pp. 125, 129, 

 130, and 131. The testimony of the author, living at Valladolid in 

 the vicinity of Jorullo, that, since my residence in Mexico, no trace 

 of an increased activity has shown itself in the mountain was the 

 earliest contradiction of the report of a new eruption in the year 

 1819 (Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1855. p. 430). As the position of 



