Show What Volcanoes are Not I What is a volcano This is a familiar question often addressed to us in our youth which Gatechnme of Universal Knowledge and similar school manuals have taught us to reply to in such terms as the following follow-ing A volcano is a burning mountain moun-tain from the summit oi which issue smoke and flames This description descrip-tion says Professor Judd is not merely incomplete and inadequate asa as-a whole but each individual propois tion of which it is made up is grossly inadequate and what ia worse perversely per-versely misleading In the first place the action which takia place at volcanoes volca-noes is not burning or combustion combus-tion and bears indeed no relation whatever to that wellknown process Nor are volcanoes necessarily mountains at all essentially they are just the reversenamely holes in the earths crust or outer portion by means of which a communication is kept up between the surface and the interior of our globe When mountains moun-tains do exist at centers of volcanic activity they are simply the heaps of materials thrown out of these hole and must therefore be regar 1 ed not as the causes but as the consequences of volcanic action Neither does this action always take place at the sum mite of volcanic mountains when such exist for eruptions occur quite as frequently on their aides or at their base That too which popular fancy regards as smoke is really condensing a to am or watery vapor and the supposed raging flames are nothing more than the globing light of a mass of molten matiia reflected from these vaporoiouJs The name of volcano tai been borrowed bor-rowed from he mouna n Viloino in the Lipari Inlands where thc un cients believed that Hepbse 1 ID Vulcan had his forge Voinnie phenomena have been at all t Mi regarded with a superstitious awe which has resulted in the gent t < I of such myths lJS tbe one just mentioned men-tioned or tbat in which Etna was said to have been formed by the mountains under which an an y nor haJ buried the rebellious lyption These stories changed their form but not their essence under a Cnrnnan dispensation and Vuloano oeotmf as the place of punishment or the Arian Emperor Tbeodosiua and Etna that of Anne Boleyn who bad sinned by perverting the faith f of King Henry VIII Popular Science I Monthly |