TRUE VOLCANOES. 419 



Mount Elias, lat. 60 17' ; long. 136 10 30". Accord- 

 ing to Malaspina's manuscripts, which I found in the 

 Archives of Mexico, 5441 metres, or 17,854 feet. Ac- 

 cording to Captain Denham's chart, from 1853 to 1856, 

 the height is only 14,970 feet. 



What M'Clure, in his account of the North- West Passage, 

 calls the Volcano of Franklin's Bay (lat. 69 57' ; long 127) 

 eastward of the mouth of the Mackenzie river, seems to be 

 a kind of earth-fire., or salses, throwing out hot, sulphurous 

 vapours. An eye-witness, the Missionary Miertsching, in- 

 terpreter to the expedition on board the ship "Investigator," 

 found from thirty to forty columns of smoke rising from 

 fissures in the earth, or from small conical mounds of clays 

 of various colours. The sulphurous odour was so strong 

 that it was scarcely possible to approach the columns of 

 smoke within a distance of twelve paces. No rock or 

 other solid masses could be discovered in the immediate 

 vicinity. Lights were seen from the ship at night, no ejec- 

 tions of mud, but great heat of the bed of the sea, and 

 small pools of water containing sulphuric acid were observed. 

 The district merits a careful investigation, and the pheno- 

 menon stands quite unconnected there, like the volcanic 

 action of the Cerro de Buen Tiempo, or of Mount Elias in 

 the Californian Cascade range (M'Clure, Discovery of the 

 N. W. Passage, p. 99 ; Papers relative to the Arctic Ex- 

 pedition, 1854, p. 34; Miertsching's Reise-Tagebuch ; 

 Gnadau, 1855, s. 46). 



1 have hitherto treated the volcanic vital activities of our 

 planet in their intimate connections, as if forming an ascending 

 scale of the great and mysterious phenomenon of a reaction 

 of its fused interior upon its surface, clothed with animal and 

 vegetable organisms. I have considered next in order to the 

 almost purely dynamic effects of the earthquake (the wave 

 of concussion) the thermal springs and salses, that is to say, 

 phenomena produced, with or without spontaneous ignition, 

 by the permanent elevation of temperature communicated to 

 the water-springs and streams of gas, as well as by diversity 

 of chemical mixture. The highest, and in its expressions, 

 the most complicated grade of the scale, is presented by the 

 volcanoes, which call into action the great and varied pro- 

 cesses of crystalline rock-formation by the dry method, and 



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