TRUE VOLCANOES, 293 



earthquakes cost no human lives, although, as I learn from 

 manuscript record,* houses were overturned by them near 



* In my Essai Politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, in the two editions 

 of 1811 and 1827 (in the latter, t. ii., p. 165-175), I have, as the na- 

 ture of that work required, only given a condensed abstract from my 

 journal, without being able to furnish a topographical plan of the vi- 

 cinity or a chart of the altitudes. From the importance which has 

 been assigned to this great phenomenon of the middle of the last cen- 

 tury, I have thought it necessary to complete this abstract here. I 

 am indebted for particular details relating to the new volcano of Jo- 

 rullo to an official document, written three weeks after the day of the 

 first eruption, but only discovered in the year 1830 by a very scientific 

 Mexican clergyman, Don Juan Jose Pastor Morales ; and also to oral 

 communications from my companion, the Biscayan Don Ramon Es- 

 pelde, who had been able to examine living eye-witnesses of the first 

 eruption. Morales discovered in the archives of the Bishop of Mich u- 

 acan a report addressed on the 19th of October, 1759, by Joaquin de 

 Ansogon-i, priest in the Indian village la Guacana, to his bishop. In 

 his instructive work (Aufentha.lt und Reisen in Mexico, 1836) Burkart 

 has also given a short extract from it (bd. i., s. 230). At the time of 

 my journey, Don Ramon Espelde was living, on the plain of Jorullo, 

 and has the merit of having first ascended the summit of the volcano. 

 Some years afterward he attached himself to the expedition made on 

 the 10th of March, 1789, by the Intendente Coreegidor, Don Juan 

 Antonio de RiaiTo. To the same expedition belonged a well-informed 

 German, Franz Fischer, who had entered the Spanish service as a 

 mining commissar}^. By means of the latter the name of the Jorullo 

 first became known in Germany, as he mentioned it in a letter in the 

 Schriften der Gesellschaft der Bergbaukunde, bd. ii., s. 441. But the 

 eruption of the new volcano had already been referred to in Italy in 

 Clavigero's Storia antica del Messico (Cesena, 1780, t. i., p. 42), and in 

 the poetical work, Rusticatio Mexicana, of Father Raphael Landivar 

 (ed. altera, Bologna, 1782, p. 17). In his valuable work Clavigero er- 

 roneously places the production of the volcano, which he writes Ju- 

 ruyo, in the year 1760, and enlarges the description of the eruption 

 by accounts of the shower of ashes, extending as far as Queratoro, 

 which had been communicated to him in 1766 by Don Juan Manuel 

 de Bustamente, governor of the province of Valladolid de Michuacan, 

 as an eye-witness of the phenomenon. The poet Landivar, an enthu- 

 siastic adherent, like Ovid, of our theory of upheaval, makes the co- 

 lossus rise, in euphonious hexameters, to the full height of three mil- 

 liaria, and finds the thermal springs (after the fashion of the ancients) 

 cold by day and warm at night. But I saw the thermometer rise to 

 126^ in the water of the Rio de Cuitimba about noon. 



In 1789, and consequently in the same year that the report of the 

 Governor Riano and the Mining Commissary Franz Fischer appeared 

 in the Gazeta de Mexico (in the fifth part of his large and useful Dic- 

 donario Geografico-historico de las Indias Occidentals 6 America, in the 

 article Xurullo,p. 374, 375), Antonio de Alcedo gave the interesting 

 information that when the earthquakes commenced (29th of June, 

 1759) in the Playas, the western volcano of Colima, which was in erup- 

 tion, suddenly became quiet, although it is at a distance of " 70 leguas" 

 (as Alcedo says, according to my map only 112 geographical miles !) 



