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THE GEYSERS. 
transparency of the body of water, and the bril¬ 
liancy of the drops as the sun shone through 
them, considerably added to the beauty of the 
spectacle. As soon as the fourth jet was thrown 
“ O’er isles and oceans sheds a sanguine light, 
“ And shoots red stars amid the ebon night ; 
“ When, at his base entombed, with bellowing sound 
“■ Fell Geyser roar’d, and struggling, shook the ground 3 
“ Pour’d from red nostrils, with her scalding breath, 
“ A boding deluge o’er the blasted heath $ 
ft And wide in air its misty volumes hurl’d 
“ Contagious atoms o’er the alarmed world : 
“ Nymphs, your bold myriads broke the infernal spell, 
ee And crush’d the sorceress in her flinty cell.” 
In these two last lines the Doctor alludes, as he tells us 
in a note, to the eruption of a volcano w hich happened sub¬ 
sequently to the time of Sir Joseph Banks’ being there, and 
which extended as far as the Geysers, and overflowed them 
with its lava. Whence he could have obtained this piece of 
information, I am at a loss to guess: certainly it was not 
from any book of good authority, for no such circumstance 
« happened.—This reminds me of a similar error in Doctor 
^darn's Geography, where it is said that Hecla is constantly 
spouting out fire and hot water, and, with the regard to the 
religion of the Icelanders, that most of them are Lutherans, 
but that there are some Pagans. The Tatsroed, who possesses 
a very mild temper, which I never saw ruffled even in trying 
circumstances, was still unable to restrain himself when he 
pointed out these inaccuracies to me, and denied the ve¬ 
racity of them with considerable warmth : quoting passages 
from English authors who had written previously to the 
time of Doctor Adam, and who had stated the facts as they 
