444 J. D. Dana—LHistory of the Changes in Kilauea. 
ing explosions, while pale flames, ashes, stones and lava were 
propelled with equal force and noise from its ragged yawning 
mouth.” The following night, crater No. 3 (Malden’s map) 
became suddenly eruptive, and a lake of fire (No. 4?), perhaps 
two miles in circumference, opened in the more distant part. 
Mr. Bishop, after a visit, Jan. 3, 1826, reported (VII) a simi- 
lar condition of the crater; and also the filling up of the lower 
pit since August, 1823, of 400 feet—probably on the view that 
the original depth was 900 feet. 
It will be observed that the above citations from Mr. Hllis 
and other early writers on Kilauea contain no mention of 
‘blowing cones,” except what is implied in the general de- 
scriptions. ‘This is true of other later reports, including that of 
Captain Wilkes, who saw no cone in action. Further, it ap- 
pears that the blowing described was done partly by the small 
cones, and partly by openings or oven-shaped places over the 
floor of the crater, as implied in the statement of Mr. Goodrich 
(p. 443), just as was true in 1886. They blow violently because 
they are small, or have relatively small apertures, so that the 
imprisoned vapors, on bursting the envelope of liquid or sem1- 
liquid lava, go out with arush and a roar. The only heights 
of ejections of lava mentioned are 30 to 40 and 50 feet; and 
the heights of cones 12, 20, and, for “ one of the largest cones,” 
150 feet; which are common facts of later time down to the 
present.* . 
The close correspondence between the heights and character 
of ejections given-in the earlier accounts, and those of recent 
years, is interesting as proving long-continued uniformity as to 
kind and quality of work even to the blowholes. The activity 
was however greater and more general than has been witnessed 
for many years. There are exaggerations, but they are mostly 
confined to the pictures, and to some of the general descrip- 
tions. The estimates made were usually below the truth, from 
honest caution. 
Further, Mr. Ellis guards the reader, as has been shown, 
against the inference, from the island-like position of the cones 
in the region of liquid lavas, that they were floating-cones.f 
*It is obvious that the high-shooting cone in the plate of Ellis’s Polynesian 
Researches (II), blowing to a height of 700 or 800 feet (measuring it by the 
height of the upper wall), is the artist’s fancy sketch, as suggested on page 436. 
It is wholly un-Kilauean and fundamentally out of place. The earlier plate from 
Mr. Ellis’s sketch in the ‘Journal’ (I), also exaggerates, but only a third as much 
except over the South Lake. 
+ On page 111 of Captain Dutton’s Report, the author presents the case differ- 
ently, as follows.—‘‘ The earlier visitors to Kilauea whose accounts of it are now 
accessible speak of a phenomenon which did not exist at the time of my visit. I 
refer here to what has been termed ‘blowing cones’ within the lake. Ellis, in 
his account of Kilauea in 1823, described them as ‘conical inverted funnels’ 
rising to heights varying from twenty to forty, or even fifty feet above the surface 
