[98] Rángá (“wrong” or crooked stream) is a name that frequently occurs, and generally denotes either that the trend is opposed to the general water-shed, or that an angle has been formed in the bed by earthquakes or eruptions.
[99] The down is applied as a styptic to cuts, the leaves are used in tanning, and the wood makes ink.
[100] Klaproth remarks that this is the only tree (? the poplar = Pippal) which the Aryan colonists of Europe remarked, and distinguished by the Sanskrit name. Thus Bhurrja became the Latin Betula, the Gothic Birkun, the Scandinavian Birki and Björk, the German Birke, and the English Birch. The name is applied under the form of Bjarkar to the thirteenth Runic letter = B or P; and it is the first Irish letter, Beith.
[101] Næfr, or birch-bark, was used for thatching: Næfra-maðr, the birch-bark man, was an outlaw (Cleasby).
[102] Mr Pliny Miles distinctly denies the existence of these fish-lakes, which Metcalfe observed, and which we clearly saw. There is a Fisksvatnsvegr, which has been travelled over, and there are reports of a volcano having burst out there about a century ago.
[103] The highest apparent point shown to us on the south-east was Grænafjall. Upon the map it is an insignificant north-eastern “mull” of the Tindafjallajökull, but refraction had added many a cubit to its low stature.
[104] Alluded to in Chap. VI.
[105] Tunga is applied to the Doab of two rivers; Tangi is a land-spit, a point projecting into the sea or river.
[106] This is the “low trap hill” of former travellers, supposed to be one of the veins that pierced the elevated diagonal.
[107] Especially M. Dortous de Mavian, whose theory was succeeded by the age of chemicals, pyrites, and alkalis, and the oxidation of unoxidised minerals, with a brief deversion in favour of “The Fire,” by Sir Humphrey Davy. Poisson extinguished it when he remarked that if fed by incandescent gases it would burst the shell, or at least would be subject to tides, causing daily earthquakes. Happily, also, the term “earth’s crust” is also becoming obsolete, or rather the solid stratum of 100 miles overlying a melted nucleus has suddenly grown to 800 (Hopkins). Sir William Thomson (Proceedings of the Royal Society, xii., p. 103) holds it “extremely improbable that any crust thinner than 2000 or 2500 miles could maintain its figure with sufficient rigidity against the tide-generating forces of sun and moon, to allow the phenomena of the ocean tides, and of precession and nutation, to be as they are now.” We will hope for more presently.