SALSES. 211 



different seasons. Skeletons of wild hogs, tigers, and birds 

 are often found in it.* The poison-tree, ^oAoti (or better, 

 puhi) upas of the Malays (Antiatis toxicaria of the traveler 

 Leschenault de la Tour), with its harmless exhalations, has 

 nothing to do with these fatal actions.f 



I conclude this section on the salses and steam and gas 

 springs with the description of an eruption of hot sulphur- 

 ous vapors, which may attract the interest of geognosists on 

 account of the kind of rock from which they are evolved. 

 During my delightful but somewhat fatiguing passage over 

 the central Cordillera of Quindiu (it took me 14 or 15 days 

 on foot, and sleeping constantly in the open air, to get over 

 the mountain crest of 11,500 feet from the valley of the Eio 

 Magdalena into the Cauca valley), when at the height of 

 6810 feet I visited the Azufral to the west of the station El 

 Moral. In a mica-schist of a rather dark color, which, re- 

 posing upon a gneiss containing garnets, surrounds, with 

 the latter, the elevated granite domes of La Ceja and La 

 Garita d^ Paramo, I saw hot sulphurous vapors flowing 

 out from the clefts of the rocks in a narrow valley (Que- 

 brada del Azufral). As they are mixed with sulphureted 

 hydrogen gas and much carbonic acid, a stupefying dizziness 

 is experienced on stooping down to measure the tempera- 

 ture, and remaining long in their vicinity. The tempera- 

 ture of the sulphurous vapors was 117°*7; that of the air 

 69° ; and that of the sulphurous brook, which is probably 

 cooled in the upper parts of its course by the snow-waters 

 of the volcano of Tolima, 84:°'6. The mica-schist, which 

 contains some pyrites, is permeated by numerous fragments 

 of sulphur. The sulphur prepared for sale is principally 

 obtained from an ochre-yellow loam, mixed with native sul- 

 phur and weathered mica-slate. The operatives (Mestizoes) 

 suffer from diseases of the eyes and muscular paralysis. 



* Junghuhn, Op. cit, abth. i., s. 201, and abth. iii., s. 854-858. 

 The weaker suiFocating caves on Java are Gua-Upas and Gua-Galan 

 (the first word is the Sanscrit guhd, cave). As there can certainly be 

 no doubt that the Grotto del Cane, in the vicinity of the Lago di Ag- 

 nano, is the same that Pliny (ii., cap. 93) described nearly 18 centu- 

 ries ago, "in agro Puteolano," as "Charonea scrobis mortiferum 

 spiritum exhalans," we must certainly share in the surprise felt by 

 Scacchi {Memorie geol. suUa Cavipania, 1849, p. 48), that in a loose 

 soil, so often moved by earthquakes, so small a phenomenon (the sup- 

 ply of a small quantity of carbonic acid) can have remained unaltered 

 and undisturbed. 



t Blume, Rumphia sive Comment, botanicce, t. i. (1835), p. 47-59. 



