Volcanic Islands by Charles Robert Darwin (best authors to read .txt) 📕

both, moreover, recent cones of eruption are scattered around the circumference of the island; but at neither have eruptions taken place within the period of history. As remarked in the last chapter, it is probable that these ancient basaltic mountains, which resemble (at least in many respects) the basal and disturbed remnants of two gigantic volcanoes, owe their present form, structure, and position, to the action of similar causes.


ST. PAUL'S ROCKS.
This small island is situated in the Atlantic Ocean, nearly one degree north of the equator, and 540 miles distant from South America, in 29 degrees 15 minutes west longitude. Its highest point is scarcely fifty feet above the level of the sea; its outline is irregular, and its entire circumference barely three-quarters of a mile. This little point of rock rises abruptly out of the ocean; and, except on its western side, soundings were not obtained, even at the short distance of a quarter of a mile from its shore. It is not of volcanic origin; and this circumstance, which is the most remarkable point in its history (as will hereafter be referred to), properly ought to exclude it from the present volume. It is composed of rocks, unlike any which I have met with, and which I cannot characterise by any name, and must therefore describe.
The simplest, and one of the most abundant kinds, is a very compact, heavy, greenish-black rock, having an angular, irregular fracture, with some points just hard enough to scratch glass, and infusible. This variety passes into others of paler green tints, less hard, but with a more crystalline fracture, and translucent on their edges; and these are fusible into a green enamel. Several other varieties are chiefly characterised by containing innumerable threads of dark-green serpentine, and by having calcareous matter in their interstices. These rocks have an obscure, concretionary structure, and are full of variously coloured angular pseudo fragments. These angular pseudo fragments consist of the first-described dark green rock, of a brown softer kind, of serpentine, and of a yellowish harsh stone, which, perhaps, is related to serpentine rock. There are other vesicular, calcareo-ferruginous, soft stones. There is no distinct stratification, but parts are imperfectly laminated; and the whole abounds with innumerable veins, and vein-like masses, both small and large. Of these vein-like masses, some calcareous ones, which contain minute fragments of shells, are clearly of subsequent origin to the others.


A GLOSSY INCRUSTATION.
Extensive portions of these rocks are coated by a layer of a glossy polished substance, with a pearly lustre and of a greyish white colour; it follows all the inequalities of the surface, to which it is firmly attached. When examined with a lens, it is found to consist of numerous exceedingly thin layers, their aggregate thickness being about the tenth of an inch. It is considerably harder than calcareous spar, but can be scratched with a knife; under the blowpipe it scales off, decrepitates, slightly blackens, emits a fetid odour, and becomes strongly alkaline: it does not effervesce in acids. (In my "Journal" I have described this substance; I then believed that it was an impure phosphate of lime.) I presume this substance has been deposited by water draining from the birds' dung, with which the rocks are covered. At Ascension, near a cavity in the rocks which was filled with a laminated mass of infiltrated birds' dung, I found some irregularly formed, stalactitical masses of apparently the same nature. These masses, when broken, had an earthy texture; but on their outsides, and especially at their extremities, they were formed of a pearly substance, generally in little globules, like the enamel of teeth, but more translucent, and so hard as just to scratch plate-glass. This substance slightly blackens under the blowpipe, emits a bad smell, then becomes quite white, swelling a little, and fuses into a dull white enamel; it does not become alkaline; nor does it effervesce in acids. The whole mass had a collapsed appearance, as if in the formation of the hard glossy crust the whole had shrunk much. At the Abrolhos Islands on the coast of Brazil, where also there is much birds' dung, I found a great quantity of a brown, arborescent substance adhering to some trap-rock. In its arborescent form, this substance singularly resembles some of the branched species of Nullipora. Under the blowpipe, it behaves like the specimens from Ascension; but it is less hard and glossy, and the surface has not the shrunk appearance.


CHAPTER III.--ASCENSION.
Basaltic lavas. Numerous craters truncated on the same side. Singular structure of volcanic bombs. Aeriform explosions. Ejected granitic fragments. Trachytic rocks. Singular veins. Jasper, its manner of formation. Concretions in pumiceous tuff. Calcareous deposits and frondescent incrustations on the coast. Remarkable laminated beds, alternating with, and passing into, obsidian. Origin of obsidian. Lamination of volcanic rocks.

This island is situated in the Atlantic Ocean, in latitude 8 degrees S., longitude 14 degrees W. It has the form of an irregular triangle (see Map 2), each side being about six miles in length. Its highest point is 2,870 feet ("Geographical Journal" volume 5 page 243.) above the level of the sea. The whole is volcanic, and, from the absence of proofs to the contrary, I believe of subaerial origin. The fundamental rock is everywhere of a pale colour, generally compact, and of a feldspathic nature. In the S.E. portion of the island, where the highest land is situated, well characterised trachyte, and other congenerous rocks of that varying family, occur. Nearly the entire circumference is covered up by black and rugged streams of basaltic lava, with here and there a hill or single point of rock (one of which near the sea-coast, north of the Fort, is only two or three yards across) of the trachyte still remaining exposed.


BASALTIC ROCKS.
The overlying basaltic lava is in some parts extremely vesicular, in others little so; it is of a black colour, but sometimes contains crystals of glassy feldspar, and seldom much olivine. These streams appear to have possessed singularly little fluidity; their side walls and lower ends being very steep, and even as much as between twenty and thirty feet in height. Their surface is extraordinarily rugged, and from a short distance appears as if studded with small craters. These projections consist of broad, irregularly conical, hillocks, traversed by fissures, and composed of the same unequally scoriaceous basalt with the surrounding streams, but having an obscure tendency to a columnar structure; they rise to a height between ten and thirty feet above the general surface, and have been formed, as I presume, by the heaping up of the viscid lava at points of greater resistance. At the base of several of these hillocks, and occasionally likewise on more level parts, solid ribs, composed of angulo-globular masses of basalt, resembling in size and outline arched sewers or gutters of brickwork, but not being hollow, project between two or three feet above the surface of the streams; what their origin may have been, I do not know. Many of the superficial fragments from these basaltic streams present singularly convoluted forms; and some specimens could hardly be distinguished from logs of dark-coloured wood without their bark.
Many of the basaltic streams can be traced, either to points of eruption at the base of the great central mass of trachyte, or to separate, conical, red-coloured hills, which are scattered over the northern and western borders of the island. Standing on the central eminence, I counted between twenty and thirty of these cones of eruption. The greater number of them had their truncated summits cut off obliquely, and they all sloped towards the S.E., whence the trade-wind blows. (M. Lesson in the "Zoology of the Voyage of the 'Coquille'" page 490 has observed this fact. Mr. Hennah ("Geolog. Proceedings" 1835 page 189) further remarks that the most extensive beds of ashes at Ascension invariably occur on the leeward side of the island.) This structure no doubt has been caused by the ejected fragments and ashes being always blown, during eruptions, in greater quantity towards one side than towards the other. M. Moreau de Jonnes has made a similar observation with respect to the volcanic orifices in the West Indian Islands.


VOLCANIC BOMBS.
These occur in great numbers strewed on the ground, and some of them lie at considerable distances from any points of eruption. They vary in size from that of an apple to that of a man's body; they are either spherical or pear-shaped, or with the hinder part (corresponding to the tail of a comet) irregular, studded with projecting points, and even concave. Their surfaces are rough, and fissured with branching cracks; their internal structure is either irregularly scoriaceous and compact, or it presents a symmetrical and very curious appearance. An irregular segment of a bomb of this latter kind, of which I found several, is accurately represented in Figure 3. Its size was about that of a man's head. The whole interior is coarsely cellular; the cells averaging in diameter about the tenth of an inch; but nearer the outside they gradually decrease in size. This part is succeeded by a well-defined shell of compact lava, having a nearly uniform thickness of about the third of an inch; and the shell is overlaid by a somewhat thicker coating of finely cellular lava (the cells varying from the fiftieth to the hundredth of an inch in diameter), which forms the external surface: the line separating the shell of compact lava from the outer scoriaceous crust is distinctly defined. This structure is very simply explained, if we suppose a mass of viscid, scoriaceous matter, to be projected with a rapid, rotatory motion through the air; for whilst the external crust, from cooling, became solidified (in the state we now see it), the centrifugal force, by relieving the pressure in the interior parts of the bomb, would allow the heated vapours to expand their cells; but these being driven by the same force against the already-hardened crust, would become, the nearer they were to this part, smaller and smaller or less expanded, until they became packed into a solid, concentric shell. As we know that chips from a grindstone (Nichol "Architecture of the Heavens.") can be flirted off, when made to revolve with sufficient velocity, we need not doubt that the centrifugal force would have power to modify the structure of a softened bomb, in the manner here supposed. Geologists have remarked, that the external form of a bomb at once bespeaks the history of its aerial course, and few now see that the internal structure can speak, with almost equal plainness, of its rotatory movement.
M. Bory St. Vincent ("Voyage aux Quatre Isles d'Afrique" tome 1 page 222.) has described some balls of lava from the Isle of Bourbon, which have a closely similar structure. His explanation, however (if I understand it rightly), is very different from that which I have given; for he supposes that they have rolled, like snowballs, down the sides of the crater. M. Beudant ("Voyage en Hongrie" tome 2 page 214.), also, has described some singular little balls of obsidian, never more than six or eight inches in diameter, which he found strewed on the surface of the ground: their form is always oval; sometimes they are much swollen in the middle, and even spindle-shaped: their surface is regularly marked with concentric ridges and furrows, all of which on the same ball are at right angles to one axis: their interior is compact and glassy. M. Beudant supposes that masses of lava, when soft, were shot into the air, with a rotatory movement round the same axis, and that the form and superficial ridges of the bombs were thus produced. Sir Thomas Mitchell has given me what at first appears to be the half of a much flattened oval ball of obsidian; it has a singular artificial-like appearance, which