22 W. T. Brigham— Kilauea in 1880. 



tally to the extent of fifteen or twenty feet by the white-hot, 

 restless waves. From the under surface of these over-hanging 

 shelves depended long and flexible skeins of what seemed to be 

 volcanic spun-glass, or Pele's hair, lapped by the white waves, 

 and seeming, in the glare in which they swung, to be hot to 

 transparency. These pendents were very numerous, often a 

 foot in diameter and six to ten feet long, fibrous as asbestos, 

 and very flexible. Although they were one of the most re- 

 markable appearances at the southeast lake, it was nearly half 

 an hour before I had any direct evidence of the process of 

 their formation. Occasionally surface explosions took place 

 and the viscous fragments, thrown violently against the roof 

 above, spun out in falling back a glass thread, sometimes sev- 

 eral from each lump, the fragment being sometimes as large as 

 a man's head. An attraction, probably electrical, as the com- 

 pass needle is strongly agitated in the vicinity of the currents 

 from the lakes, drew together, these isolated threads until the 

 hank was formed which floated like seaweed in a falling tide. 

 Although I watched several hours I did not see any of these 

 hanks fall into the lake beneath. 



The brittle nature of the banks which were formed by over- 

 flows and ejected matter loosely cemented D3 r subsequent 

 overflows or spatters, would admit of any amount of degrada- 

 tion, but how is the elevation to be explained ? It was no 

 paroxysmal force that raised these cliffs some two hundred feet. 

 Leopold von Buch, that most determined advocate of the Eleva- 

 tion theory of Volcanic Mountains, would have been satisfied 

 that his theory alone could explain the formation of these as 

 well as of the dome in Kilauea of which these cliffs were the 

 crown. A longer stay at the crater, however, gave a more sat- 

 isfactory explanation. The action in these fire lakes or pools, 

 as has often been mentioned is very irregular and intermittent, 

 often apparently ceasing on one side until the crust there is 

 cool and hard ; it then breaks out again from beneath this new 

 crust turning it back like the lid of a box against the bank to 

 which it may be soldered by the molten spatters, or, as is more 

 frequently the case, the crust is raised en masse and where it 

 touches the superincumbent cliff, carries this up with it and 

 sometimes topples it over on to the outer part of the wall. In 

 this way I believe the cliffs seen in the sketch, and the whole 

 bottom of Kilauea, nearly three miles in diameter, have been 

 floated up by degrees. If the action was constant the lava 

 would break out along the edges of the swelling plain, as indeed 

 it does when the inflow of lava is long continued, and the sur- 

 face would become a general level by the accumulation of 

 running lava in the lowest places. But in fact, after a certain 

 amount of lava has flowed up through the throats whose posi- 



