Review of Recent Geological Literature. 317 
ques de cette campagne de six mois, de ces longues chevauchees 
dans la ville detruite et sur cette Montagne Pelee, naguere veritable 
Eden, aujourd' hui terre ravagee, couverte d' un gris linceul de 
cendres, qui n' evoque plus que des souvenirs de desolation et de 
mort ! " 
The burning clouds, and the dome and spine formed at the 
crater are, according to Lacroix, the two capital new facts of the 
great eruption. The book contains a great many new things of 
minor importance, and new discussions, presented in the inimitable 
and clear style of Lacroix, but the treatment of those dominating 
scientific facts in vulcanism gives to the volume a unique value. 
The work is divided into three parts, not including a bibliography 
of the geology and geography of the volcanic islands of the West 
Indies, beginning in 1G40 and concluding with late publications con- 
sulted even during the process of printing of the volume. The first 
part treats not only of the physics of volcanic activity but presents 
in detail the facts of the late eruptions. The second part is taken 
up with petrographic discussion of the ashes, bombes, lavas and all 
ejecta of the present and of past eruptions of Martinique, and by 
a comparison of these with similar rocks from others of the vol- 
canic islands of the East Indies. Part three is devoted to certain 
minerals and rocks produced from the building stones and some 
artificial substances by the burning of St. Pierre. 
Part 1 contains a mass of descriptive details, with numerous 
photographic illustrations. At the present we can refer specifically 
only to the dome and the burning clouds. As to the former the 
author says: "The present eruption has been characterized par- 
ticularly by this fact, that the gaseous emanations and the ejection 
of solid matter have been through a single opening, above which 
was built up rapidly a dome of andesyte whence thereafter all the 
explosive phenomena arose. It will be seen later that this dome 
did not present a permanent yawning, crater-like opening during all 
the time that I studied it. If it had one, or several, during the 
paroxysms, which is quite likely, they were of very short duration. 
There is then, properly speaking, no crater of the present eruption, 
in the sense that one generally gives to the word crater. But this 
dome, in place of being raised from any point of the volcanic ground 
of Mont Pelee, has ascended from the depths of an old caldera, from 
an old explosive crater which, in the first weeks of the eruption, 
before the appearance of the dome, consequently played the role of 
a veritable crater. In fact there is an incasement of two succes- 
sive volcanic formations, the products of different mechanism." The 
author, however, applies the term crater, in his descriptions, to 
that part of the old 'caldera which has not yet been filled by the 
solid mass of the dome, nor by the pieces that become detached 
from it. This view is quite different from that entertained by *Heil- 
* The tower of Pelee; new studies of the great volcano of Martinique. 
Angelo Heilprin, 1904, p. 34. 
