NATURAL LIGHTHOUSE OF MARACAYBO. 375 



sent, it might be employed in lighting the streets of 

 Glasgow."* 



A very curious natural phenomenon, called the Lantern 

 or Natural Lighthouse of Maracaybo, has been witnessed 

 in South America. A bright light is seen every night on 

 a mountainous and uninhabited spot on the banks of the 

 river Catatumbo, near its junction with the Sulia. It is 

 easily distinguished at a greater distance than forty 

 leagues, and as it is nearly in the meridian of the opening 

 of the Lake of Maracaybo, navigators are guided by it as 

 by a lighthouse. This phenomenon is not only seen from 

 the sea -coast but also from the interior of the country, 

 at Merida, for example, where M. Palacios observed it for 

 two years. Some persons have ascribed this remarkable 

 phenomenon to a thunderstorm, or to electrical explosions, 

 which might take place daily in a pass in the mountains ; 

 and it has even been asserted that the rolling of thunder is 

 heard by those who approach the spot. Others suppose it 

 to be an air volcano, like those on the Caspian Sea, and 

 that it is caused by asphaltic soils like those of Mena. 

 It is more probable, however, that it is a sort of carburetted 

 hydrogen, as hydrogen gas is disengaged from the ground 

 in the same district.f 



Grand as the chemical operations are which are going 

 on in the great laboratory of Nature, and alarming as their 

 effects appear when they are displayed in the terrors of 

 the earthquake and the volcano, yet they are not more 

 wonderful to the philosopher than the minute though 

 analogous operations which are often at work near our 

 own persons, unseen and unheeded. It is not merely in 

 the bowels of the earth that highly-expansive elements are 

 imprisoned and restrained, and occasionally called into 

 tremendous action by the excitation of heat and other 



* Edinburgh Journal of Science, No. i. New Series, pp. 71 75. 

 t Humboldt's Personal Narrative, Vol iv. p. 254, note. 



