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Show ,.. OF VOLCANOS. 377 position, the relative age, and mode of origin of rocks, we must compare together observations from the most varied and remote regions. Problems which long perplexed the geologist in his native land in these northern countries, find their solution near the Equator. If, as has been already remarked, new zones do not necessarily present to us new kinds of rock (i.e. unknown groupings or associations of simple substances), they, on the other hand, teach us to discern the great and everywhere equally prevailing laws, according to which the strata of the crust of the earth are superposed upon each other, penetrate each other as veins or dykes, or are upheaved or elevated by elastic forces. If, then, our geological knowledge is thus promoted by researches embracing extensive parts of the earth's surface, it is not surprising that the particular class of phenomena which form the subject of the present discussion should long have been regarded from a point of view the more restricted as the points of comparison were of difficult, I might almost say arduous and painful, attainment and access. Until the close of the last century, all real or supposed knowledge of the structure or form of volcanos, and of the mode of operation of subterranean forces, was taken from two mountains of the South of Europe, Vesuvius and Etna. The former of these being the easiest of access, and its eruptions, as is generally the case in volcanos of small elevation, being most frequent in their occurrence, a hill of minor elevation became the type which regulated all the ideas formed respecting phenomena exhibited on a far larger scale in many vast and distant regions, as in the mighty volcanos arranged in linear series in Mexico, South America, and the Asiatic Islands. Such a proceeding might not unnaturally recall Virgil's shepherd, who thought he beheld in his humble cottage the type of the Eternal City, Imperial Rome. A more careful examination of the whole of the Mediterranean, and especially of those islands and coasts where men awoke to the noblest intellectual culture, might, however, have dispelled views formed from so limited a consideration of nature. Among the Sporades, trachytic rocks have been upraised from the deep bottom of the sea, forming islands resembling that which, in the vicinity of the Azores, appeared thrice periodically, at nearly equal intervals, in 32* |
