336 E. 0. Hovey— Eruptions of 1902 of La Soufriere, 



Morne Rouge to the summit, where numerous spoon-shaped 

 depressions occur in the rather loose soil of the mountain side, 

 especially between the elevations of 2400 and 3000 feet above 

 tide. These holes are of all sizes from 2 feet in diameter 

 upward, the largest one which I saw being 40 feet long, 25 

 feet wide and 5 feet deep, but the depth had evidently been 

 reduced by the sand which had been washed into it by recent 

 rains. The longer axis of this depression was ]N". 50° W., 

 pointing directly at the crater, and the longer axes of all the 

 other holes observed were pointing toward the same center. 

 The deepest part was on the up-hill side. On the down-hill 

 side of each depression was found the cause of the phenomenon, 

 and it was a bomb or ejected block from the volcano, which 

 had struck the ground with a splash, throwing the earth in all 

 directions and usually bounding or rolling out of the hole 

 which it had made. Sometimes the blocks which did the 

 work were found intact, but more frequently they had burst 

 asunder after striking. All showed that they had come out of 

 the volcano in a highly heated condition. Such splashes as 

 these can be made experimentally on a small scale in any bed 

 of stiff mud by means of well-directed stones. 



Many stones must have fallen in St. Pierre, but they are so 

 mingled with the I'ubble stones from the walls of the ruined 

 buildings that usually they are not easily distinguishable there- 

 from. Great quantities of small, rounded fragments of yellow 

 pumice are to be found now amid the ruins, the fine gray dust 

 liaving been washed away to a considerable extent by the 

 copious rains which have fallen since the great eruptions. 

 Most of the pebbles of pumice were less than three inches in 

 diameter. They are evidently from the old tuff agglomer- 

 ate and must have been torn from the beds through which the 

 volcanic vents pass and from the interior of the old cone. 

 Stones fell all over the island in some of the eruptions. 



Four ascents of Mt. Pelee, in the course of which the crater 

 rim was traversed from the great chasm on the southwest along 

 the southern and eastern edge more than two-thirds of the way 

 around the circle, and the remainder also of the rim was clearly 

 seen, enabled Curtis and me to form a reasonably definite idea 

 of the center of activity and what was going on therein. Twice 

 we followed the trail from Morne Rouge to the summit, which 

 led us for a considerable distance along the right (southern) 

 brink of the canyon of the Falaise River, and on the day inter- 

 vening between these ascents we examined the gorge of the 

 Falaise carefully from the point where the Morne Rouge trail 

 to the summit strikes it nearly to its junction with the Capot 

 River, a mile or more beyond the area of devastation. The 

 upper reaches of the gorge certainly present the scene of deso- 



