THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 7 
a faint transcript of the reality, and that our imagination can 
never conceive the dreadful spectacle which still appals their 
memories. Fortunately these awful explosions of the earth, 
which to man convert nature into the supernatural, occur at 
rare intervals; and, though scarcely a year elapse without some 
volcano bursting into action, the greater portion of the Ar¬ 
chipelago being more than once shaken, and even the ancient 
granitic floor of the Peninsula trembling beneath us, this ter¬ 
restrial instability has ordinarily no worse effect than to 
dispel the illusion that we tread upon a solid globe, to con¬ 
vert the physical romance of geological history into the 
familiar associations of our own lives, and to unite the 
events of the passing hour with those wh$h first fitted the 
world for the habitation of man. 
We have spoken of the impression which the exteriour 
beauty of the Archipelago makes upon the voyager, and the 
fearful change which sometimes comes over it, when the 
sea around him is hidden beneath floating ashes mingled with 
the charred wrecks of the noble forests which had clothed the 
mountain sides; but, hurried though we are from one part of 
our slight sketch to another, wc cannot leave the vegetation 
of this great region without looking upon it more closely. To 
recall the full charms, however, of the forests of the Archipe¬ 
lago,—which is to speak of the Archipelago itself, for the 
greater portion of it is at this moment, as the whole of it once 
was, clothed to the waters edge with trees,—we must animate 
their solitudes with the tribes which dwell there in freedom, 
ranging through their boundless shade as unconscious of the 
presence of man, and as unwitting of his dominion, as they 
were thousands of years ago, when he did not dream that the 
world held such lands and such creatures. 
When we pass from the open sea of the Archipelago into the deep 
shade of its mountain forests, we have realized all that, in Europe, 
our fancies ever pictured of the wildness and beauty of prime¬ 
val nature. Trees of gigantic forms and exuberant foliage rise 
on every side: each species shooting up its trunk to its utmost 
measure of development, and striving, as it seems, to escape from 
the dense erow'd. Others, as if no room were left for them 
