398 Scientific Intelligence. 



count by Mr. E. Finley states that the place of the path between 

 the New Lake and Old Lake, called " the bridge," was at this 

 time " swept away by an overflow of red hot lavas," which seems 

 to imply that the solid lava making the bridge was melted away 

 by the encroaching of the liquid lavas from one side or the other, 

 owing to the increased heat. This condition continued until late 

 that evening. After midnight, between 2 and 3 o'clock, the lavas 

 of both lakes suddenly disappeared and the fires went out. At 

 7 h that morning, when the clouds had cleared away, it was 

 discovered also that the bluffs of solid lavas that bordered the 

 Old Lake (Halemaumau), part of which were 200 feet higher 

 than the surface of the boiling lavas, had sunk into the depths 

 below — the depths deserted by the liquid lavas. Besides this, 

 the region of the " bridge " between the two lakes had subsided, 

 so as to make one great chasm of the area of the two lakes. By 

 the night of March *7th all was total darkness in the crater, " ex- 

 cepting a few small lights from previous flows;" and on the 

 afternoon of March 8th, as one who had been down into the crater 

 reported, the fires were to appearance wholly extinct, though hot 

 vapors still came up ; the site of the New Lake was a great hole 

 150 feet to bottom, and that of Halemaumau a much larger cavity 

 500 feet deep. In addition, at the time of the earthquakes, 

 several rents were made outside of the crater of Kilauea ; one on 

 the road from the Volcano House to another pit-crater called 

 Kilauea-Iki, and two about two miles from Kilauea on the 

 Keauhou road (leading toward the steamboat landing). For many 

 days after the disappearance of the lakes "large portions of the 

 edge were continually falling into th® terrible gulf with thunder- 

 ing sounds" that were attributed at first to earthquakes. 



No outflows over the slopes of Kilauea above the sea-level are 

 repoi'ted. There may have been a submarine discharge. All known 

 eruptions of Kilauea have been similar in general character : a 

 condition of unusual heat and activity in each case being followed 

 "by a sinking of the lavas in the crater attending a discharge 

 (above the sea-level in some cases), and a subsidence also of more 

 or less of the bordering solid lavas. The extent within Kilauea 

 of the surface of activity in the spring of 1840, and of the conse- 

 quent subsidence of solid lavas at the eruption, six months before 

 the writer's visit to the region, has not since been equalled ; for 

 an area 12,000 feet in length and 3,000 feet in mean width then 

 sunk down 400 feet ; but alternations of activity and of discharge 

 with subsidence of less extent, followed by quiet and a gradual 

 increase in heat and activity of the lava, preparatory to a new 

 discharge, have many times occurred. The discharge and subsi- 

 dence are not premonitions of great activity, but results of 

 fractures somewhere and an outflow, with a collapse, from which 

 recovery is slow. J. d. ix 



4. Making deposits of the remains of birds, squirrels, and 

 other small animals. — Professor E. W. Hilgakd, in a paper on 

 the asphaltum deposits of California, published in Williams's 



