292 REACTION OF THE INTERIOR OF THE EARTH 



At the Hacienda de Jorullo, in the confusion of the 

 general flight by night, a deaf and dumb negro slave 

 was forgotten and left behind. A Mestizo had the 

 humanity to return and rescue him while the house 

 was still standing ; and the narrators still recounted 

 with pleasure that he was found kneeling, with a con- 

 secrated taper in his hand, before the picture of Nuestra 

 Senora de Guadalupe. 



According to the widely prevailing and accordant 

 native tradition, the eruption of large rocks, scoriae, 

 sand, and ashes was in the first days always accom- 

 panied by that of muddy water. In the account above 

 alluded to, written on the 19th of October 1759, by a 

 man who, with an accurate knowledge of the locality, 

 was describing that which had just taken place, it is 

 said expressly " que espele el dicho Volcan arena 

 ceniza y agua." All eyewitnesses relate (I translate 

 from the description in the official report " on the State 

 of the Volcano of Jorullo," March 10, 1789, by the 

 intendant Colonel Eiafio and the German commissary 

 Franz Fischer, who had entered into the Spanish ser- 

 vice) that "before the dreadful mountain appeared 

 (antes de reventar y aparecerse este terrible cerro) the 

 earthquake-shocks and subterranean noises increased 

 more and more ; that on the day itself the flat ground 

 was seen to rise visibly (se observe que el plan de la 

 tierra se levantaba perpendicularmente), and the whole 

 more or less swelled up so that blisters (vexigones) 

 appeared, of which the largest is now the volcano (de 

 los que el mayor es hoy el cerro del volcan). These 

 i-aised blisters, of very different magnitude, and some of 

 them of tolerably regular conical form, afterwards burst 



