20 W. T. Brig ham— Kilauea in 1880. 



traveled over it, but on the evening of July 24th, 1880, with 

 Mr. R. Forbes Carpenter and Mr. Furneaux, I arrived at the 

 northeast bank of the crater, where we found a very comfort- 

 able hotel replacing the grass shanty I had occupied in 1865, 

 while surveying Kilauea. The scene was familiar. Five times 

 had I come to the crater at night on my way from Hilo, and 

 almost as many times while journeying from Kau, but the 

 wonder of the view never dulled, and to-night the fires far away 

 to the southwest were very brilliant, brighter, perhaps, than I 

 had seen them before. 



On the morning of the 25th, we descended into the crater by 

 the usual path leading under Waldron's Ledge. The tempera- 

 ture on the upper bank was 58° Fahr. and the steam from the 

 many cracks parallel with the crater walls seemed more abundant 

 than usual. These massive walls had been much broken, and 

 huge fragments of ancient lava had been tumbled clown in the 

 path, making the descent much easier, and also indicating more 

 clearly than I had ever seen before, the way in which this vast 

 crater has attained its present proportions. The original walls 

 may have been of small extent, but the jar of earthquake shocks 

 cracks the not firmly united layers of lava which compose the 

 bounding walls, and finally throws down to the floor blocks of 

 lava in size proportioned to the strength or frequency of the 

 shocks ; then the next period of activity in the lava-supply sends 

 over the floor streams of lava which float or melt these blocks, 

 thus clearing away the talus. It is difficult to understand how 

 the melted lava can raise and float the much more compact old 

 lava, but I have seen it done more than once and the impres- 

 sion the sight conveyed was of a black hand gently passing 

 under the heavy block and raising it or carrying it along. In 

 the same way lava has insinuated itself beneath stone walls 

 built to bar its progress and lifted and overthrown the futile 

 barrier. So extensively has this process been at work in Kil- 

 auea that my survey of the crater, made with great care in 1865 

 and six years later adopted by the Trigonometrical Survey of 

 the Hawaiian Government and republished on their official 

 map, is already antiquated, except in a few points, ascertained 

 by my monuments still standing ; the whole boundary has per- 

 ceptibly changed, and I consider Kilauea nearly five per cent 

 larger than it was eighteen years ago. 



The change visible on the bottom of the crater was even 

 greater I was provided with an excellent barometer, by the 

 kindness of my friend Mr. Carpenter, and found by it that 

 while the bottom of the crater, at the base of the outer wall 

 where first reached in our descent, was 650 feet below the Vol- 

 cano House, the central portion was only 300 feet, or, in other 

 words the floor was raised in the general shape of a flat dome 



