The glassy lavas, when distended by escaping gases, give rise to the formation of pumice, the white colour of which, as in the case of the foam of a wave, is due to the reflection of a portion of the light in its frequent passage from one medium to another—in this case from air to glass, and from glass to air. The volcanic bombs formed from glassy lavas are often of especially beautiful and regular forms. Sometimes the passage of steam through a mass of molten glass produces large quantities of a material resembling spun glass. Small particles or shots of the glass are carried into the air and leave behind them thin, glassy filaments like a tail. At the volcano of Kilauea in Hawaii this filamentous volcanic glass is abundantly produced, and is known as 'Pele's Hair'—Pele being the name of the goddess of the mountain. Birds' nests are sometimes found composed of this beautiful material. In recent years an artificial substance similar to this Pele's hair has been extensively manufactured by passing jets of steam through the molten slag of iron-furnaces; it resembles cotton-wool, but is made up of fine threads of glass, and is employed for the packing of boilers and other purposes.
The very finely-divided volcanic dust is often borne to enormous distances from the volcano out of which it has been ejected. The force of the steam-current carrying the fragments into the atmosphere is often so great that they rise to the height of several miles above the mountain. Here they may actually pass into the upper currents of the atmosphere and be borne away to the distance of many hundreds or thousands of miles. Hence it is not an unusual circumstance for vessels at sea to encounter at great distances from land falling showers of this finely divided, volcanic dust. We sometimes meet with this far-travelled, volcanic dust under very unexpected circumstances. Thus, in the spring of 1875 I had occasion to visit Prof. Vom Rath of Bonn, who showed me a quantity of fine volcanic dust which had during the past winter fallen in considerable quantities in certain parts of Norway. This dust, upon microscopic examination, proved to be so similar to what was known to be frequently ejected from the Icelandic volcanoes that a strong presumption was raised that volcanic outbursts had been going on in that island. On returning to England I found that the first steamer of the season had just reached Leith from Iceland, bringing the intelligence that very violent eruptions had taken place during the preceding months.
DISPERSION OF PUMICE AND VOLCANIC DUST.
This finely-divided volcanic dust is thus carried by the winds and spread over every part of the ocean. Everyone is familiar with the fact that pumice floats upon water; this it does, not because it is a material specifically lighter than water, but because cavities filled with air make up a great part of its bulk. If we pulverise pumice, we find the powder sinks readily in water, but the rock in its natural condition floats for the same reason that an iron ship does—because of the air-chambers which it encloses. When this pumice is ejected from a volcano and falls into a river or the ocean, it floats for a long time, till decomposition causes the breaking down of the thin glassy partitions between the air chambers, and causes the admission of water into the latter, by which means the whole mass gets water-logged. Near the Liparis and other volcanic islands the sea is sometimes covered with fragments of pumice to such an extent that it is difficult for a boat to make progress through it, and the same substance is frequently found floating in the open ocean and is cast up on every shore.
During the year 1878 masses of floating pumice were reported as existing in the vicinity of the Solomon Isles, and covering the surface of the sea to such extent that it took ships three days to force their way through them. Sometimes these masses of pumice accumulate in such quantities along coasts that it is difficult to determine the position of the shore within a mile or two, as we may land and walk about on the great floating raft of pumice. Now, recent deep-sea soundings, carried on in the 'Challenger' and other vessels, have shown that the bottom of the deepest portion of the ocean, far away from the land, is covered with these volcanic materials which have been carried through the air or floated on the surface of the ocean. To these deeper parts of the ocean no sediments carried down by the rivers are borne, and the remains of calcareous organisms are, in these abysses, soon dissolved; under such conditions, therefore, almost the only material accumulating on the sea bottom is the ubiquitous wind- and wave-borne volcanic products. These particles of volcanic dust and fragments of pumice by their disintegration give rise to a clayey material, and the oxidation of the magnetite, which all lavas contain, communicates to the mass a reddish tint. This appears to be the true origin of those masses of 'red-clay' which, according to recent researches, are found to cover all the deeper parts of the ocean, but which probably attain to no great thickness.
But while some portion of the materials ejected from volcanoes may thus be carried by winds and waves, so as to be dispersed over every part of the land and the ocean-bed, another, and in most cases by far the largest, portion of these ejections falls around the volcanic vent itself. It is by the constant accumulation of these ejected materials that such great mountain masses as Etna, Teneriffe, Fusiyama, and Chimborazo have been gradually built up around centres of volcanic action.
There are cases in which the formation of volcanic mountains on a small scale has actually been observed by trustworthy witnesses. There are other cases in which volcanic mountains of larger size can be shown to have increased in height and bulk by the fall upon their sides and summits of fragmentary materials ejected from the volcanic vent. In all cases the examination of these mountain-masses leads to the conclusion that they are entirely built up of just such materials as we constantly see thrown out of volcanoes during eruption.
FORMATION OF VOLCANIC MOUNTAINS.
Thus we are led to the conclusion that all volcanic mountains are nothing but heaps of materials ejected from fissures in the earth's crust, the smaller ones having been formed during a single volcanic outburst, the larger ones being the result of repeated eruptions from the same orifice which may, in some cases, have continued in action for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
No observer has done such useful work in connection with the study of the mode of formation of volcanic mountains as our countryman, Sir William Hamilton, who was ambassador at Naples from 1764 to 1800, and made the best possible use of his opportunities for examining the numerous volcanoes in Southern Italy.