AUGUST 21, 1902] 
air to breathe. There was no fire in the ordinary sense of the 
word, only the air was itself intensely hot and was charged with 
hot dust. The suffocating cloud only lasted a few minutes. 
Those who survived this ordeal mostly escaped, though many died 
within a few hours from shock, or from the severity of their 
injuries. In some cases a few survived, entirely or almost en- 
tirely uninjured, in a room in which many others died. Most 
of those who escaped had shut themselves up in the rum cellars 
or in substantially built houses, and had firmly closed all doors 
and windows. By the time the hot blast had reached the coast 
the sand it contained was no longer incandescent, and though 
still at a very high temperature it did not set fire to wood or 
burn the clothes of those exposed to it. The burns on the sur- 
vivors were chiefly on the outer aspect of the arms and legs, and 
on the faces, and confined to parts not protected by their 
clothes. 
The Rain of Dust. 
Complete darkness now covered the whole north end of St. 
Vincent—a darkness more intense than any the inhabitants 
had ever before experienced. The fugitives had to creep along the 
roads or feel their way along the roadsides. The roaring of the 
mountain was terrible—a long, drawn-out, continuous sound re- 
sembling the roar of a gigantic animal in great pain. Fine ash 
and sand rained down over the whole country with occasional 
showers of large stones. Some of these were so hot as to set fire 
to the trash roofs of huts in the south-end of Georgetown, at a 
distance of 7 miles from the crater. In Kingstown, 12 
miles from the Soufritre, the ash was at first moist, but after- 
wards dry. It had a strong sulphurous smell, and pattered on 
the roofs like a heavy shower of tropical rain. Around the 
volcano the earth shook and trembled continuously, and the 
motion was described to us as undulating rather than resembling 
the sharp shock of an earthquake. Only in one or two cases 
were the walls of houses injured. What was taking place on the 
summit of the mountain no one can tell, but all who passed that 
night in the vicinity of the Soufriére agree that there was one 
black suffocating cloud, and only one. In all probability the 
eruption had reassumed the ordinary phase, and the showers of 
ash and stones were produced by violent upward explosions of 
steam. By half-past 5 o'clock the ash was falling in Barbadoes, 
100 miles to the eastward, whither it had been carried by the 
upper currents of air in a direction opposite to that of the trade 
winds. In St. Vincent the darkness lessened slightly before 
nightfall, but the rain of dust and the noises lasted until early in 
the ensuing morning. 
When day broke it was seen that in St. Vincent, and even 
in Barbadoes, everything was covered with fine grey ash re- 
sembling a fall of snow. The dust had penetrated into the in- 
terior of the houses, where it lay in a thin film on walls and 
furniture. In Kingstown there were stones as large as a hen’s 
egg ; in Georgetown and Chateaubelair some had fallen as much 
as I foot in diameter. Little damage, however, appears to have 
been done to growing crops, except in the north-end of the 
island. In fact, many believe that the sulphurous ash had in- 
secticidal properties, and benefited the vegetation. From 
Chateaubelair it could be seen that the volcano was still emit- 
ting puffs of slaty-coloured steam, and showers of fine dust were 
falling on the leeward side of the mountain. For several days 
these discharges of vapours continued, but a new pheno- 
menon now attracted more attention. The ravines which 
furrow the south side of the mountain were found to be dis- 
charging clouds of vapour, and this gave rise to reports of fissures 
having opened on the flanks of the Soufriére, of subsidiary 
eruptions arising from these fissures, and of streams of lava flow- 
ing down the valleys. As a matter of fact, they were really due 
to the action of water flowing through the hot sand, which in 
some places had almost obliterated the old stream courses, as will 
be explained more fully later on. By May 15 the volcanic 
activity had apparently subsided, and the mountain remained 
clear and unclouded. The explosions of steam in the valleys 
continued and are probably still going on. 
The state of quiescence continued until Sunday, May 18. Con- 
fidence was being restored, and the inhabitants of those districts 
near the mountain which had not suffered severely were return- 
ing to their homes. On the windward side the work of burying 
the bodies had been completed and things were resuming their 
normal course. But about 8 o’clock that evening an ominous 
sound was heard from the crater. Its nature was at once 
recognised and struck the black population with terror. The 
NO. 1712, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
403 
noises were as loud as those of the first eruption, and the 
lightning was very vivid. On the leeward side complete dark- 
ness prevailed, and ashes and sand fell freely for some hours. 
In Georgetown the fall of ashes was quite inconsiderable, not 
exceeding a thin film on the roofs of the houses. Gradually the 
noises lessened, the darkness lifted, and the moon appeared 
again. No lives were lost and practically no damage was done, 
but exactly what happened on those parts of the mountain nearest 
the crater it is, in the circumstances, impossible to say. This 
second eruption was the last which proceeded from the main 
crater. Clouds of steam were sometimes seen gently rising for 
some days later, but nothing of the nature of a volcanic outburst 
has since taken place. 
Products of the Eruption. 
Wearrived at Kingstown on Tuesday, June 10, and proceeded 
at once to Chateaubelair, where Mr. Jas. E. Richards, of 
Kingstown, kindly placed a house at our disposal. The geo- 
logical products of this eruption proved to be of very simple 
character. The Soufriére and the surrounding country were 
covered with a layer of ashes mostly in the form of fine dark- 
coloured sand, but mixed with spongy bombs of various sizes 
and many ejected blocks composed of fragments of the old rocks 
of the hill. Lapilli and scoria are there in plenty, as is obvious 
where the heavy rains have washed away the finer material, but 
the greater part of the ejecta consists of fine sand which, when 
dry, is hot and yellowish-grey in colour, but when wet becomes 
almost black. This sand, as has already been noted by many 
observers, contains plagioclase felspar, hypersthene, augite, 
magnetite and fragments of glass, and represents a fairly well- 
crystallised hypersthene-andesite magma which has been blown 
to powder by the expansion of occluded steam. 
The coarser material is mostly a slaggy andesite with crystals 
of plagioclase and pyroxene. There is little pumice, though we 
obtained afew fragments which floated on water and contained 
but few crystals visible to the naked eye. The larger bombs 
are often black, highly lustrous and glassy when broken across. 
Some were seen at Wallibu (4 miles from the crater) 3 feet 
in diameter. The ejected blocks consist of weathered andesites 
and andesitic tuffs such as can be seen in the walls of the crater. 
They are very numerous, and some are more than 5 feet across. 
In addition to these, fine-grained dark green banded rocks occur, 
which appear to be baked and indurated sediments, probably the 
mud from the bottom of the crater lake, or the finer beds inter- 
calated in the older volcanic series. Another type of ejected 
block which is very common in some parts of the hill is a coarse- 
grained aggregate of felspar, hornblende (brown under the 
microscope), and perhaps olivine. It is not vesicular and con- 
tains little or no glass, being apparently holocrystalline. _These 
rocks are’ very friable, and the crystals are loosely aggregated 
together. They seemed to us to be comparable to the sanidin- 
ites of the Eifel and many other modern volcanic districts. 
They are certainly quite unlike true plutonic diorites, both in 
their structure and in the character of their minerals. 
It may be noted that none of these rocks are characteristic of 
this eruption, but all can be found among the older materials of 
the hill. The hardened, baked sediments were well known to 
the Caribs, who have long used them for the manufacture of 
their finer stone implements. The felspar-hornblende blocks 
were found by us among the older rocks, and in some places 
even as rounded masses enveloped in the old lavas. Some of 
the fresher bombs in the river beds and the seashore can hardly 
be distinguished from those which were the product of this 
eruption, though undoubtedly of much clder date. 
The conclusion was forced upon our minds that immense quan- 
tities of hot sand had rushed down the hill into these valleys 
in an avalanche which carried with it a terrific blast, and piled 
the ashes deep in the sheltered ravines, at the same time sweep- 
ing everything off the exposed ridges which lay between. The 
rain of volcanic material, which lasted for hours after the hot 
blast had passed, then covered the surface of the country with a 
final sheeting of fine dust and scoriz. 
Effects produced by the Hot Blast. 
When we ascended the Soufriére, the evidence of the passage 
of a hot blast laden with sand was overwhelmingly clear. The 
various stages of its action, and its varying intensity at different 
spots, are most easily observed on the windward side, where the 
country is more flat and open, and there are fewer ravines and 
