344 COSMOS. 



measured the angles of altitude of the summits. According 

 to C. von Dittmar, the Kliutschewsk was entirely quiescent 

 since the eruption of 1841, until the lava burst forth again 

 in 1853. The falling in, however, of the summit of the 

 Schiwelutsch interrupted the new action {Bulletin de la Classe 

 Physico-Mathem. de VAcad. des Sc. de St. Petershourg, t. xiv., 

 1856, p. 246). 



Four more volcanoes, mentioned in part by Admiral Lutke, 

 and in part by Postels — namely, the Apalsk, still ^moking, 

 to the southeast of the village of Bolscheretski, the^lchischa- 

 pinskaja Sopka (lat. 55° 11^), the cone of Krestowsk (lat. 

 56° 4^), near the Kliutschewsk group, and the Uscnkowsk — 

 I have not cited in the foregoing series, from want of more 

 exact specification. The central mountain range of Kamts- 

 chatka, especially in the plain of Baidaren, lat. 57° 20^, east- 

 ward of Sedanka, presents (as if it had been " the field of an 

 ancient crater of about four wersts, that is to say, the same 

 number of kilometres, in diameter") the remarkable geolog- 

 ical phenomenon of effusions of lava and scorias from a blis- 

 tery and often brick-colored volcanic rock, which in its turn 

 has penetrated through fissures in the earth at the greatest 

 possible distance from any frame-woik of raised cones (Er- 

 man, Reise, bd. iii., 221, 228, and 273 ; Buch, lies Canaries, 

 p. 454). The analogy is here very striking with what I 

 have already circumstantially explained regarding the Mal- 

 pays, the problematical fields of debris in the elevated plain 

 of Mexico, (see p. 297). 



V. Islands of Eastern Asia. 



From Torres Strait, which in the 10th degree of south- 

 ern latitude separates New Guinea and Australia, and from 

 the smoking volcano of Flores to the most northern of the 

 Aleutian Isles (lat. 55°), there is a multitude of islands, for 

 the most part volcanic, which, considered in a general geo- 

 logical point of view, it would be somewhat difficult, on ac- 

 count of their genetic connection, to divide into separate 

 groups, and which increase considerably in circumference to- 

 ward the south. Beginning at the north, we first observe 

 that the curved series* of the Aleutians, issuing from the 



* See Dana's remarks on the curvatures of ranges of islands, whose 

 convexity in the South Sea is almost always directed toward the south 

 or southeast, in th^ United States Exploring Exjiedition by Wilkes, vol. 

 X. {Geology, by James Dana), 1849, p. 419. 



