Yol. 66.] 
VOLCANO OP MATAVANU IN SAVAII. 
635 
At Matautu, 2 miles west of the lava, the damage was due to the 
Ua Sami formed by the action of the lava on the sea-water, 
which was considered even more poisonous than that discharged 
from the crater. Many cocoa-nut palms had been damaged and 
some had died, but most had recovered; while several breadfruit 
trees were killed entirely, and some recovered only with the loss of 
their upper branches. 1 
During the night of my visit to the crater some large frigate- 
birds of two kinds, black and white, with long tails, were con¬ 
stantly circling about the crater at a height of several hundred 
feet, and were clearly visible in the lurid reflected light. The)'' 
have been noticed by others to whom I have spoken. 
Mr. H. I. Jensen (ojo. cit. pp. 666-70) gives a full account of the 
petrology of the Samoan lavas : I quote only his conclusions. Petro- 
logically the Samoan rocks are very like one another and the basalt 
near Auckland (New Zealand). The olivine content varies from nil 
to nearly 50 per cent. Most of the rocks are hypohyaline, if ob¬ 
tained from a depth beneath the surface of a flow; hyaline or 
hemicrystalline, highly vesicular or scoriaceous, when obtained 
near the surface. The earlier rocks erupted were probably augite- 
andesites, the later rocks being olivine-basalts. The new flow is 
richer in iron-ores than any of the old flows. Mr. Jensen does not 
discuss the reason of the high temperature and great fluidity of 
the lava at the moment of the eruption. 
Comparison with Kilauea. 
It may be well to discuss the many resemblances and few 
differences between the volcanoes of Matavanu and Kilauea in 
Hawaii, which latter I visited soon after the former. Both are of 
the effusive type, that is, characterized by the discharge of lava 
very slightly charged with steam and other volcanic gases, and 
hence little subject to explosive action: in which respect they 
contrast strongly with the volcanoes of the West Indies and 
Central America, where most of the recent eruptions have been 
highly explosive, and attended with the discharge of a vast 
quantity of ashes, lapilli, and pumice, but little or no lava. Not 
that explosions have been entirely absent in these Pacific volcanoes : 
I found in the walls of the crater of Matavanu some beds of tuff, 
that is, consolidated ash, but they were subordinate in thickness 
and importance to those of lava ; and also on the flanks of the cone 
some bombs of basalt. Similarly on Kilauea I saw a bed of lapilli 
about a foot thick, but it was on the slopes of the old encircling 
cone comparable to Monte Somma, and there was no trace of such 
about the working crater. Moreover, its amount was strikingly 
different from the deposits of ash ranging up to 100 or 200 feet in 
thickness formed in 1902 on the Soufriere in St. Vincent, or on 
Montague Pelee in Martinique, or on Santa Maria in Guatemala, or 
even those formed on Vesuvius in 1906. 
1 No human lives were lost by the eruption. 
