INTRODUCTION 
BOOK 1 
glowing fires by night and their clouds of steam by day, culminating now 
and then in a stupendous explosion, like that which, in prehistoric time, 
destroyed the island of Santorin. As the islanders voyaged eastw’ard they 
would see, on the coast of Asia Minor, the black bristling lavas of the 
“ Burnt Country,” perliaps even then flowing from their rugged heaps of 
cinders. Or when, more adventurously still, they sailed westward into the 
Tyrrhenian waters, they beheld the snowy cone of Etna, with its dark 
canopy of smoke and the lurid nocturnal gleain of its fires ; while from time 
to time they witnessed there on a still more stupendous scale the horrors of 
a great volcanic eruption. 
From all sides, therefore, the early Greek voyagers would carry back 
to the mother-country marvellous tales of convulsion and disaster. They 
would tell how the sky rapidly darkened even in the Ifiaze of mid-day, how 
the land was smothered with dust and stones, how over the sea there spread 
such a covering of ashes that tlie oai'smen could hardly drive their vessels 
onw'ard, how red-hot stones, whirling high overhead, rained down on sails and 
deck, and crushed or burnt whatever they fell upon, and how, as the earth 
shook and the sea rose in siidden waves and the mountain gave forth an 
appalling din of constant explosion, it verily seemed that the end of the 
world had come. 
To the actual horrors of such scenes there could hardly fail to be added 
the usual embellishments of travellers’ tales. Thus, in the end, the volcanoes 
of tlie Mediterranean basin came to play a not unimportant part in Hellenic 
mythology. They seemed to stand up as everlasting memorials of the 
victory of Zeus over the giants and monsters of an earlier time. And as 
the lively Greek beheld Mount Etna in eruption, his imagination readily 
pictured the imprisoned Titan buried under tlie burning roots of the mount- 
ain, breathing forth fire and smoke, and convulsing the country far and 
near, as he turned himself on his uneasy pallet. 
When in later centuries the scientific spirit began to displace the 
popular and mythological interpretation of natural phenomena, the existence 
of volcanoes and their extraordinary phenomena offered a fruitful field for 
speculation and conjecture. As men journeyed outward from the Medi- 
terranean cradle of civilization, they met with volcanic manifestations in 
many other parts of the w'orld. When they eventually penetrated into the 
Far East, they encountered volcanoes on a colossal scale and in astonishing 
aliundance. Wlien they had discovered the New World they learnt that, in 
that hemisphere also, “ burning mountains ” were numerous and of gigantic 
dimensions. Gradually it was ascertained that vast lines of volcanic activity 
encircle the globe. By slow degrees the volcano was recognized to be as 
normal a part of the mechanism of our planet as the rivers that flow on the 
terrestrial surface. And now at last men devote themselves to the task of 
ci'itically watching the operations of volcanoes with as much enthusiasm as 
they display in the investigation of any other department of nature. They 
feel that their knowledge of the earth extends to little beyond its mere outer 
skin, and that the mystery which still hangs over the vast interior of the 
