362 COSMOS. 



through which the Araxes flows in a large bend. They both 

 stand on an elliptic volcanic plateau, whose major axis runs 

 south-east and north-west. The Kasbegk and the Tshegem 

 have likewise no summit crater, although the former has 

 thrown out vast eruptions towards the north, in the direc- 

 tion of Wladikaukas. The greatest of all these extinct vol- 

 canoes, the trachytic cone of the Elburuz, which has risen 

 out of the talc and dioritic schistous mouutains, rich in 

 granite, of the valley of the lliver Backsan, has a crater-lake. 

 Similar crater-lakes occur in the rugged highlands of Kely, 

 from which streams of lava flow out between eruption-cones. 

 Moreover, the basalts are here, as well as in the Cordilleras 

 of Quito, widely separated from the trachyte- system ; they 

 commence from twenty-four to thirty-two miles south of the 

 chain of the Elburuz, and of the Tschegem on the Upper 

 Phasis or Rhion valley. 



P . The north-eastern portion (the Peninsula of 

 KamtscTiatka). 



The peninsula of Kamtschatka, from Cape Lopatka, 

 which, according to Krusenstern is in lat. 513', as far north 

 as to Cape Ukinsk, belongs, in common with the island of 

 Java, Chili and Central America, to those regions in which 

 the greatest number of volcanoes, and, it may be added, of 

 still active volcanoes, are compressed within a very small 

 area. Fourteen of these are reckoned in Kamtschatka 

 within a range of 420 geographical miles. In Central Ame- 

 rica I find in a space of 680 miles, from the volcano of 

 Coconusco to Turrialva in Costa Rica, twenty-nine volcanoes, 

 eighteen of which are still burning ; in Peru and Bolivia, 

 over a space of 420 miles, from the volcano Chacani to 

 that of San Pedro de Atacama, fourteen volcanoes, of which 

 only three are at present active, and in Chili, over a space 

 of 960 miles, from the volcano of Coquimbo to that of San 

 Clemente, twenty-four volcanoes. Of the latter, thirteen are 

 known to have been active within the periods of time em- 

 braced in historical records 



Our acquaintance with the Kamtschatkan volcanoes, in 

 respect to their form, the astronomical determination of their 

 position and their height, has been vastly extended in recent 



