Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 137 of 779 - First - Home
Here Are Found Those Spiracles, Which Are Called By The
Natives The Nostrils Of The Peak (Narices Del Pico).
Watery and
heated vapours issue at intervals from several crevices in the
ground, and the thermometer rose to 43.2 degrees.
M. Labillardiere
had found the temperature of these vapours, eight years before us,
53.7 degrees; a difference which does not perhaps prove so much a
diminution of activity in the volcano, as a local change in the
heating of its internal surface. The vapours have no smell, and
seem to be pure water. A short time before the great eruption of
Mount Vesuvius, in 1805, M. Gay-Lussac and myself had observed that
water, under the form of vapour, in the interior of the crater, did
not redden paper which had been dipped in syrup of violets. I
cannot, however, admit the bold hypothesis, according to which the
Nostrils of the Peak are to be considered as the vents of an
immense apparatus of distillation, the lower part of which is
situated below the level of the sea. Since the time when volcanoes
have been carefully studied, and the love of the marvellous has
been less apparent in works on geology, well founded doubts have
been raised respecting these direct and constant communications
between the waters of the sea and the focus of the volcanic fire.*
(* This question has been examined with much sagacity by M.
Brieslak, in his "Introduzzione alla Geologia," tome 2 pages 302,
323, 347. Cotopaxi and Popocatepetl, which I saw ejecting smoke and
ashes, in 1804, are farther from both the Pacific and the Gulf of
the Antilles, than Grenoble is from the Mediterranean, and Orleans
from the Atlantic.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 137 of 779
Words from 37110 to 37393
of 211363
