7« 



NATURE 



[May 2 2, 1890 



may cause numerous cases of confusion with the very similar 

 transliterations of the Russian sounds yu and yit. Moreover, 

 English readers are already accustomed to render hi withj, as, 

 for instance, in the name of the Pribylow Islands. Why should 

 this name be changed now to Pribitilow, which is at the same 

 time unfamiliar and misleading ? If the change is made, n>, ;o, 

 /(, must be written as ic, m, ia. 



The Russian .w might perhaps be better represented by jli. 

 The symbol would then represent a softened /, equivalent to the 

 French y, and reproduce the right sound. A. Wilkins. 



Tashkend, April 2/14, 1890. 



I ASSUME that the following three conditions must be 

 fulfilled :— 



(i) The object aimed at is principally transliteration, 

 combined with the possibility of recovering, by its means, the 

 original Russian spelling. 



(2) Correct pronunciation is only a secondary object, as oral 

 teaching alone cr.n convey it in perfection. Nevertheless, the 

 transliteration adopted should come as near the correct pro- 

 nunciation as possible, without sacrificing the principal object, 

 transliteration. 



(3) The system adopted should satisfy a want, not only of the 

 English-speaking "nations, but also, as far as possible, of all 

 those which use the Latin alphabet. This object can be reached 

 only by some mutual concessions. 



Now, the system adopted in the article in Nature (vol. 

 xli. p. 397) would, it seems to me, fulfil these requirements as 

 nearly as possible, if the following comparatively slight modifica- 

 tions were admitted : — 



(i) The Russian a; would be better rendered by/ than by zh. 

 ;k has not quite the same sound as the English ;", which in most 

 cases has a sound of d in it (as in journey, jay, jam). But a; 

 corresponds exactly to the French j, and is not too far remote 

 from the German /(?/. For this reason, as a compromise between 

 the three languages, /, as an equivalent of m, would answer 

 better than zh. I mean to say that, by means of the J, it will 

 be easier for Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen to get at 

 the right pronunciation of the Russian >k than through the 

 medium oizh. 



(2) The Russian h {tcha) should be rendered by tck instead of 

 ch, and that for the sake of the French and Germans, whose «•/* 

 is pronounced differently from the English ch. For the English 

 reader the adoption of either tch or ch would not iovolve any 

 difference of pronunciation. 



Thus, the Russian mil (tea) should be transliterated into 

 tchat, which the three nations would pronounce nearly in the 

 same way ; whereas, according to the proposed plan, it would 

 be spelt chaf, which a Frenchman would pronounce shai' and a 

 German something like Khai. Viixmeeii should be spelt 

 Tchikhatchcv , and not Chikhachev. 



(3) For a similar reason I would propose stch for the Russian 

 m instead of the shch of the proposed system. In Russian ci is 

 pronounced exactly like m (ciacrie, happiness, is pronounced 

 macTie, and cieri, an accoimt, merTj) ; and for this reason if 

 4 (tcha) is rendered by tch, the addition of an s would make it 

 m {stcha). The stch would be more palatable for the French and 

 Germans than the very puzzling shch. 



(4) I should propose to use the s-ign ' ^ for indicating the 



compound letters — thus, tch, stch, &c. This would much 

 facilitate the eventual recovery of the Russian letters. 



(5) The last letter of the Russian alphabet, V (called ijitza), 

 is rendered by oe in the table (loc. cit.). This must be a 

 misprint. 



This letter has become almost obsolete in Russian, and is used 

 in the Church Slavonic only. It is the exact equivalent of the 

 Greek ypsilott, and should be rendered by y. 



The requirements of the Italian pronunciation (with its c and 

 f/f^) and of the Spanish (with its j) are more difficult to satisfy ; 

 but most of the educated Italians and Spaniards understand 

 other languages. Ch. R. Osten-Sacken. 



Heidelberg, Germany, May 5. 



The Eruption of Vulcano Island. 



In the pages of Nature two notes have appeared from my 

 pen describing the phenomena of the eruption that commenced 



' In De Gubernatis's " Dizlonario Biographico," 1879, Tchikhatchn' is 

 spelt Cihaceff. 



[O73, VOL. 42]- 



on August 3, 1888, which apparently is now coming to an end. 

 1 have not been able to visit the spot recently, but my friend 

 and pupil Mr. Lewis Sambon, who helped me in conducting the 

 party of English geologists through the Lipari Islands last 

 auiumn, and on whom I can thoroughly depend, has given me 

 the information that I make use of in these notes. Mr. J. P. 

 Iddings, whom Mr. L. Sambon accompanied, also kindly con- 

 firmed some of the latter, besides which Mr. Sambon brought 

 back a few very good whole-plate negatives. 



From September 1889, when I and the geologists were at 

 Vulcano, the eruption has continued with very varying activity. 

 On March 15, 1890, at 9 p.m., there was a very violent explosion 

 resembling the blowing up of a mine. Some windows were broken 

 at Lipari, which is about seven kilometres distant, whilst lapilli 

 reaching the size of large peas, with drops of condensed vapour, 

 were showered upon the town. Behind Monte della Guardia, 

 which hides Vulcano from the town of Lipari, for upwards of 

 three minutes a bright red reflection was seen, which is of im- 

 portance as indicating the presence of incandescent matter in 

 the volcanic chimney ; for there are floating about a number of 

 extraordinary hypotheses, some verging on the magical, to 

 explain this eruption. 



After the evening of the 15th, Vulcano was very active, but 

 the explosions were gradually diminishing in force, and com- 

 pletely stopped on the 17th. 



On March 25 my two friends visited the island. They found 

 at the base of the cone an enormous number of the bread-crust 

 bombs, the mode of formation of which I have already described 

 and explained. The.-e were of recent ejection, and Mr. L. 

 Sambon says they much resemble those of the earlier period of 

 the eruption ; and the specimens which have been kindly brought 

 to me thoroughly confirm this view. Both those examined on 

 the island, and the smaller ones I received still contain numerous 

 fragments of dolerite, which, as I have shown, give origin to much of 

 the pyroxenes, magnetite, olivine, and triclinic felspar distributed 

 throughout the paste, and the origin of which is proved by the 

 fact that they are rarely without a bit of the old microlitic dolerite 

 base still attached to them even when very small crystals nearly 

 isolated occur. Such is the amount of impurity of the paste, 

 that any attempt at a chemical analysis would be a waste of time, 

 and even the microscope can afford us little information as to the 

 group of rocks to which the ma^ma belongs. The general facies of 

 the projectiles, the earlier products of this cone, all point to the rock 

 being near to if not really a rhyolitic obsidian. Referring to a 

 discovery I made last autumn Mr. Sambon says: — "I broke a 

 great number of the bombs, but I found in none of them that 

 white agglomeration of quartz and felspar that we often met with 

 in September 1889." These inclusions much resemble numerous 

 similar ones that I found in 1887 in an old lava stream of 

 Stromboli, and which have been sliced, and the examination of 

 which will be published soon. In the meantime they may be 

 said to be composed chiefly of milky quarlz and felspar of meta- 

 morphic or plutonic origin, and are no doubt the remnants of 

 the sub-volcanic platform. 



Some of the recent bombs reach gigantic sizes for such a small 

 volcano. One of these, possibly shot out on March 15, 1890, 

 was, above ground, 9 feet high, 6 feet broad, and 6 feet thick. 

 The obsidian crust was 4 inches thick, and the main fissure, 

 through which the pumiceous interior protruded, was 2 feet broad, 

 forming, as it were, a monster crusty loaf. 



So violent were the explosions on March 15, 1889, that Signor 

 Jacono, Mr. Narlian's factor, had to fly for protection with his 

 family to the caves near the Faraglioni, because great^ stones 

 were falling in considerable numbers near Mr. Narlian's villa, 

 which is about a kilometre from the crater. 



Mr. L. Sambon describes the crater as some metres deeper 

 than when we visited it together six months before ; but, com- 

 paring his and my photographs, there has been very little 

 change. The crater walls were covered with yellow sublimations, 

 which were not so in September 1889, and he judges their in- 

 clination at from 40° to 45°. In the centre of the small floor 

 was a great white patch with yellow border, which my expe- 

 rience would lead me to suppose to be due to boric acid, with 

 the edges of a mixture of seleno-sulphur and realgar. A good 

 deal of smoke (which is again new) was issuing from the bottom, 

 especially to the north-north-east ; and a few metres only from 

 the edge of the slope beneath the highest point, and extendmg 

 to where we took our photographs, were a considerable number 

 of fumaroles. One of those nearer the last point (north-north- 

 west) was much larger, issuing from a fissure, and so violent and 



NO. 



