CHAPTER VI 



POPULAR AND CONTEMPORARY VULCANOLOGY IN ITS 

 RELATION TO THE VIRUNGA VOLCANOES 



" Where cavernous chasms are yawning 

 Through lands that are painfully new." 



A Riddle of Roads. Verse I, 



THE science of vulcanology, dealing as it does with 

 the birth and death of worlds and the most stupendous 

 force on earth, cannot but make an appeal to the 

 imagination of most of us and to others, like myself, holds an 

 irresistible fascination. I will therefore, before taking him 

 to the realms of Vulcan, refresh my reader's memory with a 

 short epitome on the subject in its bearing on the Virunga 

 volcanoes. 



To the mind of most people when they first visit an active 

 volcano — if they have not read up the subject beforehand — 

 there will come a crowd of questions which may be embodied 

 in the one query : " Why is a volcano ? " and then like the 

 usual reply to the question, " Why is the sea salt ? " the 

 answer will be very indefinite and probably entirely 

 wrong. 



The text-books tell us that a volcano is a more or less 

 perfectly conical hill or mountain formed by the successive 

 accumulations of ejected matter in a state of incandescence 

 or high heat — its summit usually terminating in a bowl-like 

 hollow called a crater. From the crater are ejected — some- 

 times continuously, sometimes with long intervals of quiescence 

 but always more or less explosively, gas, steam or water, 

 dust, scoria (bits of natural slag) and molten rock (lava), 



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