304 COSMOS. 



Tinguaton, or by Lower Italy, or (of hardly 20 feet in height) 

 by the declivity of the great Kamtschatkan volcano, Awat- 

 scha,* which was ascended in July, 1824, by my friend and 

 Siberian companion, Ernst Hofmann, consist of scorias and 

 ashes surrounding a small crater, which has thrown them 

 out, and bas been in return buried by them. In the horni- 

 tos nothing like a crater is to be seen, and they consist — and 

 this is an important character — merely of basaltic balls, with 

 shell-like separated fragments, without any admixture of 

 loose angular scoriag. At the foot of Vesuvius, during the 

 great eruption of 1794 (and also in earlier times), eight dif- 

 ferent small craters of eruption {hocche nuove) were formed, 

 arranged upon a longitudinal fissure ; they are the so-called 

 parasitic cones of eruption, which poured forth lava, and are 

 even by this circumstance entirely distinct from the hornitos 

 of JoruUo. "Your hornitos," wrote Leopold von Buch to 

 me, " are not cones accumulated by erupted matters ; they 

 have been upheaved directly from the interior of the earth." 

 The production of the volcano of Jorullo itself was compared 

 by this great geologist with that of the Monte Nuovo in the 

 Phlegraean fields. The same notion of the upheaval of six 

 volcanic mountains upon a, longitudinal fissure forced itself 

 as the most probable upon Colonel Riano and the mining 

 commissary Fischer in 1789 (see ante, p. 295), upon myself 

 at the first glance in 1803, and upon Burkart in 1827. 

 With both the new mountains, produced in 1538 and 1759, 

 the same questions repeat themselves. Upon that of South- 

 ern Italy the testimonies of Falconi, Pietro Giacomo di To- 

 ledo, Francesco del Nero, and Porzio are circumstantial, 

 near the time of the catastrophe, and prepared by educated 

 observers. The celebrated Porzio, who was the most learned 

 of these observers, says : " Magnus terras tractus, qui inter 

 radices mentis, quern Barbarum incola; appellant, et mare 

 juxta Avernum jacet, sese erigere videbatur et montis subito 

 nascentis figuram imitari. Iste terrse cumulus aperto veluti 

 ore magnos ignes evomuit, pumicesque, et lapides, cineres- 

 que."t 



* Erman, Reise um die Erde^ bd. iii., s. 538; Cosmos, vol. v., p, 

 236. Postels ( Voyage autour du Monde par le Cap. Lutke, partie hist., 

 t. iii.,, p. 76) and Leopold von Buch {Description Physique des lies Ca- 

 naries, p. 448) mention the similarity to the hornitos of Jorullo. In 

 a manuscript most kindly communicated to me, Erman describes a 

 great number of truncated cones of scoriae in the immense lava-field to 

 the east of the Baidar Mountains, on the peninsula of Kamtschatka. 



t Porzio, Opera omnia, Med., Phil., et Mathem. in vnum coUecta, 



