336 REACTION OF THE INTERIOR OF THE EARTH 



the western extremity of the Kuen-lun ; we may also, I 

 think, regard with particular attention, as being at 

 their easternmost extremity, another igneous pheno- 

 menon, whose existence was first made known by me 

 (Asie centrale, t. ii. p. 427 and 483). In the important 

 researches which my honoured friend and colleague in 

 the Institute, Stanislas Julien, has undertaken, at my re- 

 quest, for the purpose of obtaining from the rich geogra- 

 phical sources of the old Chinese literature, information 

 respecting the Bolor, the Kuen-lun, and the " starry- 

 sea," he found in the great dictionary edited by the 

 Emperor Yongtsching in the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century, a description of the " perpetual flame " which 

 issues forth from a cave in the hill Schinkhieu on the 

 slope of the eastern part of the Kuen-lun. This pheno- 

 menon, the light of which is seen from a great distance, 

 cannot well be called a volcano : it appears rather to be 

 analogous to the Chimera in Lycia, famous of old 

 among the Greeks. It is a fountain of fire, a spring of 

 gas, which the volcanic activity of the interior of the 

 earth keeps always lighted (Kosmos, Bd. iv. S. 296, 

 note 51 ; Eng. ed. p. 252 and note 375.) 



Arabian writers say, but generally without assigning 

 any particular year, that, in the middle ages, erup- 

 tions of lava took place at particular points on the 

 south-west coast of Arabia, in the islands of Zobayr 

 in the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and at Aden (Wellsted, 

 Travels in Arabia, vol. ii. p. 466 468), in Hadhramaut, 

 in the straits of Ormuz, and in the western part of the 

 Persian gulf; always upon ground which had been 

 the seat of volcanic activity since prehistoric times. 

 The epoch of the eruption of a volcano at Medina 



