NATURE'S WARRING FORCES. Mauna Loa is again in eruption. A few days ago a great earthquake was reported in Samoa, many miles south of Hawaii. If there is any connection between the two points th eruption of the Hawaiian mountain ought to relieve the strain to the south and possibly make the? whole Pacific immune against earthquakes for the time being. Old Mauna Loa has the methods of th geysers, only the intervals are longer. The actions of volcanoes are among the most wonderful phenomena of nature. For many centuries it was believed their eruptions come from below the golid crust of the earth, where all was supposed to be a molten mass of immeasurable heat. But the Mount Pelee eruption we believe the scientists have decided came from superheated isteam sea water through a fissure coming in contact con-tact with chemically-heated rocks, which in turn converted the water into superheated steam which is as explosive as gunpowder, and so Mount Pelee was rent as a steam boiler sometimes is. This gave an outlet to a vast deposit of carbonic arid gas. which being heavier than air. swept down the mountain moun-tain on the groind. as water would, and asphyxiated the people of St. Pierre as quickly as does the "dead air" of a shaft when men are lowered into it. But all such exhibitions are as terrible as they are magnificent, and men who are at safe distances from it are impressed with man's utter littleness and helplessness when such elements of nature are in action. "Within the year past all the tremendous fores of nature seem to have been at work. At San Francisco, Fran-cisco, Valparaiso, np in Bering sea, in one of the Japanese islands, at Samoa, in Central Asia, in Mount Vesuvius, at Kingston, and now Mauna Loa; the whole eirole of th earth has been visited in places, while jrreat storms have swept both the continents con-tinents and the rolling oceans. The records show that men have inhabited the Ptrth for certainly 500 centuries, but not since history his-tory began to keep its solemn records have so many cataclysms occurred in a single year as in this last one. Surely the Old World must be running past some of the stormy capes that jut out into the boundless bound-less ocean of space.