,^48 COSMOS. 



when they were drawn up again they should say that they 

 had found great riches, and that the Injierno of Masaya de- 

 served in future to be called el Paraiso del Masaya, The op- 

 eration was afterward repeated several times, until the Gov- 

 ernor of the neighboring city of Granada conceived some sus- 

 picion of the deceit, or perhaps of a fraud upon the revenue, 

 and forbade any " further descents on ropes into the crater." 

 This took place in the summer of 1538 ; but in 1551 Juan 

 Alvarez, the Dean of the Chapter of Leon, again received 

 frdii Madrid the naive permission " to open the volcano and 

 procure the gold that it contained." Such was the popular 

 credulity of the 16th century ! But even in Naples, in the 

 year 1822, Monticelli and Covelli were obliged to prove, by 

 chemical analysis, that the ashes thrown out from Vesuvius 

 on the 28th October contained no gold !* 



The volcano of Izalco, situated on the west coast of Cen- 

 tral America, 32. miles northward from San Salvador, and 

 eastward from the harbor of Sonsonate, broke out 1 1 years 

 after the vokano of Jorullo, deep in the interior of Mexico. 

 Both eruptions took place in a cultivated plain, and after the 

 prevalence of earthquakes and subterranean noises (bramidos) 

 for several months. A conical L!ll rose in the Llano de 

 Izalco, and with it simultaneously an eruption of lava poured 

 from its summit on the 23d February, 1770. It still remains 

 undecided how much is to be attributed, in the rapidly-in- 

 creasing height, to the upheaval of the soil, and how much 

 to the accumulation of erupted scoriae, ashes, and tufa masses ; 

 only this much is certain, that since the first eruption the 

 new volcano, instead of soon becoming extinguished, like Jo- 

 rullo, has remained uninterruptedly active, and often serves 

 as a beacon-light for mariners near the landing-place in the 

 Bay of Acajutla. Four fiery eruptions are counted in an 

 hour, and the great regularity of the phenomenon has aston- 

 ished its few accurate observers.! ThS violence of the erup- 

 tions was variable, but not the time of their occurrence. 

 The elevation which the volcano of Izalco has now attained 

 since the last eruption of 1825 is calculated at about 1600 

 feet, nearly the same as the elevation of Jorullo above the 

 original cultivated plain, but almost four times that of the 



constellation of the Southern Cross, and earliest of all Columbus 

 {Exam, crlt., t. iv., p. 235-240), a fraorment of a map of the Antilles. 



* Humboldt, Views of Nature, p. 368. 



t Squier, Nicaragua, its People and Monuments, vol. ii., p. 104. (John 

 Bailey, Centi-al America^ 185% p. 75.) 



