366 
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 
settled from 3 to 6 feet and parts of it 
much more than this. 
Some persons beheve that the wave 
extending outward from the volcano, 
which swept the lake shore and caused 
such serious loss of life and damage to 
property, was caused by the sudden sub- 
sidence of the island, but such an occur- 
rence would probably have been at- 
tended by a severe earthquake, and there 
was no earthquake at this time. Indeed 
there is very definite direct evidence that 
the settling was gradual. When Mr. 
Martin first visited the island after the 
eruption, the floor of Mr. Ward's house 
was just awash. When he returned later 
the house was completely submerged. 
COMPARISONS WITH MONT PEIvEE 
It is interesting to compare the results 
of this eruption with those of the erup- 
tion of Mont Pelee, which occurred in 
Alay, 1902. The area devastated by 
Pelee was approximately 52 square 
miles; that devastated by Taal was ap- 
proximately 142 square miles. Pelee 
killed some 30,000 people, while Taal 
killed only about 1,400, but this com- 
paratively small number of casualties 
was due solely to the fact that the terri- 
tory devastated was very sparsely inhab- 
ited. The village of Gulad was the same 
distance from the crater of Taal as was 
St. Pierre from the crater of Pelee. In 
Gulad 116 out of 120 inhabitants were 
killed outright and the four survivors 
Avere dreadfully injured. Had there 
been a large city at this distance from 
Taal the mortality would have been hor- 
rible. 
The force of the eruption from Pelee 
would seem to have been greater than 
that from Taal, as Pelee spread ashes in 
one direction for a distance of 100 miles, 
whereas the greatest distance to which 
Taal sent any considerable fall of ashes 
was 32 miles.* 
Why, then, was the zone of complete 
destruction around Taal so much larger 
than that around Pelee? The probable 
explanation is a simple one. In each in- 
stance the expanding mass of gases from 
*See National Geographic Magazine, 1902. 
the crater tended to extend itself in all 
directions. The crater of Pelee was some 
4,002 feet above the sea, while the crater 
rim of Taal was in places less than 400 
feet above the lake.f 
Mr. Pratt has called attention to the 
fact that this eruption of Taal may be 
accurately described in the following 
words applied by Hovey to the eruptions 
of La Soufriere and Mont Pelee in 1902: 
'Tt is evident that there was a blast or 
a series of blasts of hurricane violence 
from the crater ... as a feature of 
the eruptions. . . . The overturned 
trees constitute the principal evidence. 
They all point away from the 
crater except for slight modifications due 
to local topography. The blast extended 
radially in all directions from the crater, 
suggesting the explanation that some 
great volume of steam, rising from the 
throat of the volcano, could not find room 
for expansion upward on account of the 
column of steam and ashes which had 
preceded it and the ashes falling there- 
from, and that it expanded with explo- 
sive violence horizontally and downward, 
following the configuration of the moun- 
tain." 
TODAY TAAL VOIvCANO SLUMBERS PEACE- 
FULLY 
Today Taal Volcano slumbers peace- 
fully. The great gap recently torn in its 
crater floor is filled by the shimmering 
waters of a placid lake, from which there 
hardly rises so much as a whiff of steam ; 
but somewhere below that smiling sur- 
face titanic energies are again slowly but 
surely gathering. Sooner or later they 
will once more rend the solid earth asun- 
der in an explosion which will blow rocks 
and earth to powder and drive that pow- 
der in a death-dealing blast across the 
neighboring country. What precautions 
should be taken to prevent future great 
loss of life? 
The reason why the last eruption of 
Taal killed more people than have any 
of its known predecessors is that the 
territory in the vicinity of. the volcano 
had become more thickly settled. The 
rich soil of this region tempts the Fili- 
t Philippine Journal of Science, Vol. VI, 
No. 2, p. 83. 
