Copyright, 1916, by William Drake Westervelt Honolulu, T.H.
BOSTON, U.S.A.
PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO.
LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO., LTD.
10 Orange St., Leicester Sq., W.C.
1916 [[iii]]
FOREWORD
However doctors may differ concerning the way that our earth came into being, most of them agree that in its early days meteoric bodies from space flew together and produced a hotter globe than at present. Perhaps its surface was all covered with vast circular lakes of lava such as our telescopes reveal in great perfection, ring upon ring, over the surface of the moon. On the moon these rings and pits are now cold, remnant from a time when the gases from the inside of our satellite were bubbling forth from a great internal heat supply and bringing with them oceans of slag which seethed and swirled in circular pools which formed symmetrically within ramparts of their own spatter.
The earth is not without traces of similar circular ramparts in the shape of long curved chains of volcanoes, mostly in the sea, which would appear as ridges if the ocean were to dry up. The line of the Hawaiian Islands from Kauai to Mauna Loa on the large island of Hawaii is such a curved ridge, now of enormous height [[iv]]above the bottom of the Pacific, but perhaps at one time much lower and more extended into something like a circle. These islands appear to have been built by overflows of lava from a curved crack which followed along the old rampart, just as we now find smoke-cracks along the small ramparts which restrain the hot lavas in Halemaumau in the pit of Kilauea. The last activity along this crack appears to have moved slowly through thousands of years from west to east, and each volcanic mountain that was built made a stopper to force the liquid out along the crack farther eastward until finally two live volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Kilauea, were left at the extreme east end, still spouting out the liquid and building up domes.
Some men of science say that the molten liquid, which is mostly an iron-stained glass, foamy with the intensely hot gases which escape from the inside of the earth, comes from an under layer beneath the outer crust of the earth, which would be found anywhere if we went down deep enough. Others say that it comes from scattered pockets of liquid under a stiff shell and over a stiffer inner globe. However this may be, there is some agreement that the depth from which the liquids come is about seventy miles and we know that vast quantities of gas escape with them. Possibly the gases [[v]]unite chemically with each other and so themselves produce some of the heat.
It is clear that heat and gas action are the motive agents which make volcanoes so lively, so much so that simultaneously Mauna Loa and Kilauea may maintain liquid columns of lava at two different elevations ten thousand feet apart. This is accounted for by the fact that the melted glass is so charged with gases under high pressure that it seethes up and down in the cracks and tubes which it occupies according to their form and size, and according to the coming together or opening apart of their walls, just as any sparkling wine makes a foam which rises or falls according to the suddenness of the uncorking or to the size of the glass into which it is poured.