"Please, teacher, it's a mountain with a hole in it."
From a photograph. Copyright by W. P. Romans
SACRED FUJIYAMA AND ITS COUNTERPART
FOUR THOUSAND MILES AWAY
On the top is the famous Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of Japan, and on the bottom Mount Rainier in the State of Washington. Although they are more than four thousand miles apart, the two volcanoes look as if they had been cast in the same mould, owing to the uniform system by which volcanoes are built up.
THE WISE MEN AND THE ANT CRATERS
It does look it, doesn't it? But, what is still more striking, it isn't a mountain with a hole in it at all, if you mean, as the little girl in the geography class meant, that it was once an ordinary mountain and then had a hole put through it. For a long time it was thought that volcanoes were simply mountains through which fire and lava from the interior had forced its way. Finally, however, some scientist thought perhaps of his Proverbs 6:6. In any event wise as he must have been—how else could he have been a scientist?—he went to the ant, learned her ways and became wiser. It was by noticing how the ants build their little craters with the sand and clay they carry from their underground homes that men got the idea that volcanoes may be built up in much the same way. So they set to observing Mr. Volcano's habits more closely, and sure enough, the ant had told the answer! The stones, lava, cinders, and the stone dust called "volcanic ash" are shot out by the explosion, and coming down in showers pile around the opening, as the ant piles the pellets around the entrance to her nest. As the explosions keep on the crater is piled higher and higher, and the stones, cinders, and things, rolling down the sides, spread the pile out at the bottom, much as the ant drops pellets over the edge of her growing pile, and so both the cone-like ant-hill and the big volcanic cone are built up.
WHY THE VOLCANO DOES NOT SMOKE
But here is something about volcanoes that will surprise most people. They throw mud, they throw stones, but they don't smoke. What we call smoke is the steam that makes—or at least helps make—the explosion. It often has the color of brown smoke because of the rock which has been blown into dust. Neither do volcanoes make "ashes." What is called "ash" is this rock powder, made when the rocks are blown into pieces by the sudden expansion of the water in them into steam.