Fig. 2.
Turning from cast-iron to other metals we find further manifestations of this expansive solidification. Bismuth is a notable example. In his lectures on Heat, Dr. Tyndall exhibited an experiment in which a stout iron bottle was filled with molten bismuth, and the stopper tightly closed. The whole was set aside to cool, and as the metal within approached consolidation the bottle was rent open by its expansion, just as would have been the case had the bottle been filled with water and exposed to freezing temperature. Mercury affords another example. Thermometers which have to be exposed to Arctic temperatures are generally filled with spirit instead of quicksilver, because the latter has been found to burst the bulbs when the cold reached the congealing point of the metal, the bursting being a consequence of the expansion which accompanies the act of congelation. Silver also expands in passing from the fluid to the solid state, for we are informed by a practical refiner that solid floats on molten silver as ice floats on water; it also, as likewise do gold and copper, exhibits surface converging currents in the melting-pot like those depicted above for molten iron.
It may, however, be objected that metals are too distantly related to volcanic substances to justify inferences being drawn from their behaviour in explanation of volcanic phenomena. With a view therefore of testing the question at issue with a substance admitted as closely allied to volcanic material, we appealed to the furnace slag of iron-works. The following are extracts from the letters of an iron manufacturer of great experience[2] to whom we referred the question:—
“I beg to inform you that cold slag floats in molten slag in the same way cold iron floats in molten iron.
“I filled a box with hot molten slag run quickly from a blast furnace; the box was about 5½ feet square by 2 feet deep, and I dropped into the slag a piece of cold slag weighing 16 lbs., when it came to the top in a second. I pushed it down to the bottom several times and it always made its appearance at the top: indeed a small portion of it remained above the molten slag.”
Fig. 3.
Here then we have a substance closely allied to volcanic material which manifests the expansile principle in question; but we may go still further and give evidence from the very fountain-head by instancing what appears to be a most cogent example of its operation which we observed on the occasion of a visit to the crater of Vesuvius in 1865 while a modified eruption was in progress. On this occasion we observed white-hot lava streaming down from apertures in the sides of a central cone within the crater and forming a lake of molten lava on the plateau or bottom of the crater; on the surface of this molten lake vast cakes of the same lava which had become solidified were floating, exactly in the same manner as ice floats in water. The solidified lava had cracked, and divided into cakes, in consequence of its contraction and also of the uprising of the accumulating fluid lava on which it floated, more and more space being thus afforded for it to separate, on account of the crater widening upwards, while through the joints or fissures the fluid lava could be seen beneath. But for the decrease in density and consequent expansion in volume which accompanied solidification, this floating of the solidified lava on the molten could not have occurred. Reference to [Fig. 3], which represents a section of the crater of Vesuvius on the occasion above referred to, will perhaps assist the reader to a more clear idea of what we have endeavoured to describe. A A are the streams of white-hot lava issuing from openings in the sides of the central cone, and accumulating beneath the solidified crust B B in a lake of molten lava at C C; the solidified crust B B as it was floated upwards dividing into separate cakes as represented in [Fig. 4]. (See also [Plate I].)
